Foreign Perspectives

Many people these days work their way through a short list of the top directories when they’re promoting a new website. For some it’s a very short list: addurl to google and they’re done, for others they either slog away for months or just use one of the manual submission services to do it for them.

However, many people ignore all the new directories that are launched every day. After all, they’re weighing in with PR0 so why bother about them at all?

Well, for one thing google had PR0 when it started out (OK, so they probably fiddled the books to give it PR10 from day 1, but it should have had PR0). It’s the same with all the little directories that are launched. Certainly few of them will get beyond PR5 but links from all those little PR1-4 directories add up even if the bulk of them are sitting around PR1-PR2.

Also, they are usually free at the start but charge for listings after anything from 6 months to a year, essentially when the owner gets swamped with all the free submissions (which, in my case amounted to over 100 a day this time last year on Whole Earth Directory which I assume is fairly typical). So, if you go for a free entry now, it’ll save you money later and indeed it will save you from having to add a reciprocal link to the directory (generally the first step in trying to stem the flood of free entries).

Sounds good then? The problem is that these directories are launched just about every day of the week right through the year so it’s a major hassle in trying to keep up with them all (yes, I tried for a while). Fortunately, those nice folks in India have come to our aid again though and some services are on offer to do it for you for around $20/month which should net you something like 50 new directories each month and, even better, is the kind of growth in inbound links which the search engines love.