Do Free Directory Links Really Count?

Whenever SEOs hear about my Free Directory Listings Reviews, their first question is almost always, "do those links really count?". That is a valid question, so I have decided to try to answer that in my directory reviews.

I have added another column to the quick reference table titled "IBL Shown". This shows if that directory's links are shown in a back link check, at one of the big 3 SEs, for my site or one of my client's sites that I used in the review test sample.

Remember Yahoo! is known to show the largest sample of back links, Google only shows a very small sample and MSN shows something in between. The fact the an IBL (inbound back link) is not shown in Google or MSN is not very significant.

I used SeoElite to initially check this data, but you can do the same thing for free with Link Harvester since you don't really care about your link anchor text for this exercise (note: as follow up, I went back and double checked with Link Harvester and found a few that SeoElite missed and vice versa). You can also just check your back links manually at each search engine using the link: and/or linkdomain: commands. The Moral of this story is that none of these tools or the search engine are 100% consistent, but good enough for our purposes.

So you want to know the answer to the title question, do you? Well the answer is some do and some don't. So far I have only reviewed my site and one other, but I will be checking all the sites in the review sample and adding those results to my reviews.

I know the next question you want to ask. That is, "even if the links are shown, do they count for much?". That's a bit harder to clearly answer. Using the "Link Value" calculation data in SeoElite as a guide, the directories links show a range of strength from what I consider "minor strength" to zero. I can tell you that submitting to free directories got this site noticed by search engines in the beginning, before I had any other back links.

I will continue to monitor the back links and update my reviews accordingly.

As always, comments are welcome below (you folks aren't very chatty) or you can email me by clicking on my name.

martin