Directory submission services: are they worth paying for?

The category covers a range. At one end a person works through a few dozen launch boards and software directories by hand, writing a slightly different description for each. At the other end a script posts the same text to hundreds of sites. Most offers sit somewhere between, and the sales page rarely tells you where.

The work itself is usually this:

• You send a name, tagline, description, logo, screenshots and a URL.
• The service creates accounts on each directory, sometimes under its own email address.
• It fills in each submission form and, where a directory charges for listing, may or may not pay that fee.
• You get a spreadsheet of the sites submitted to, sometimes with links to live listings.

Note the word “submitted”. A directory can review submissions, hold them in a queue or publish only paid ones, so a submission is not yet a listing.

A report that says “submitted to 200 directories” can contain four quite different outcomes:

• A live listing on a page of its own, indexed, with a link to your site. This is the outcome you’re paying for.
• A live listing that search engines never index. Google says indexing isn’t guaranteed and not every page it processes will be indexed (source). A page that isn’t indexed sends no search visitors and passes nothing.
• A pending submission that may be approved in weeks, or never.
• One line on a page of hundreds of links, which nobody reads.

Even the first kind varies. The link may be followed, or marked nofollow, sponsored or ugc; the guide to link rel attributes explains the difference. And the directory may have real visitors or none. The guide on judging launch directories covers how to tell.

Google defines link spam as creating links primarily to manipulate search rankings, and its list of examples includes several that describe the low end of this category directly (Google’s spam policies):

• Low-quality directory or bookmark site links.
• Using automated programs or services to create links to your site.
• Buying or selling links for ranking purposes, including exchanging money for links.

The policy also says where the line is. Paid links aren’t a violation as long as they’re qualified with rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored", and Google prefers sponsored for paid placements (source). So paying a directory for a featured slot with a sponsored link is an ordinary ad purchase. A package sold as a number of followed links from a number of directories is what the policy describes.

Google’s stated consequence is that sites violating its policies may rank lower or not appear at all, and that human review can result in a manual action. Its page on hiring an SEO is blunt about who carries that: you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire. The same page tells site owners to avoid SEOs who talk about link popularity schemes or submitting a site to thousands of search engines (source).

Cleaning up is slow. For a manual action over unnatural links, Google asks you to contact the owners of the linking sites and get the links removed or qualified, and to disavow only what you couldn’t get removed (Manual Actions report help). That is much harder when the listings sit under accounts you don’t control.

Ask for the full list before paying

A service confident in its list will show it. If the answer is “proprietary”, stop there. Google’s advice is to be careful with a company that is secretive or won’t clearly explain what it intends to do. With the list in hand, cross out everything that isn’t about software, your niche or launches. A general “add your URL” directory has no reason to send you a customer.

Open listings the service created recently

Ask for five live listings from the past two months, for products you can look up. For each one, check:

1. Does the product have a page of its own, with a description and images?
2. Is the link in the page’s HTML, and what is its rel? The backlink checker shows both.
3. Is the page blocked from search? Run it through the indexability checker.
4. Does it appear in Google? Search site: followed by the listing’s URL. Google notes that this operator doesn’t necessarily return every indexed URL (source), so also search for the product’s name with the directory’s name.

If most of the samples aren’t indexed, the rest of the list won’t be either.

Ask who owns the accounts

You should receive the login for every listing, or the listings should be created under your email address. Otherwise you can’t fix a typo, update a screenshot or remove a listing later.

Read the promise

• Poor: “500+ high-DR dofollow backlinks, guaranteed rankings.” It sells a link count, a third-party score and a result nobody can promise. Google’s page states that no one can guarantee a number one ranking.
• Better: “We submit by hand to these 40 sites. Here are last month’s live listings. You get every login, and we report which submissions were approved.”

Both lines are examples we wrote to show the pattern, not quotes from a real service. Scores quoted in a pitch are worth checking too: see DR vs DA vs Open PageRank.

The slow part of submitting is preparing the material, and you have to do that for a service anyway. Once it exists, each form takes a few minutes.

1. Write one kit. A tagline, a description at three lengths (one sentence, one paragraph, three paragraphs), a logo, three screenshots, your categories and your pricing. The tagline and description guide and the listing visuals guide cover both.
2. Shortlist eight to ten places. Start from a list of launch directories and the review sites in your category, and keep only the ones that pass the checks above. Where to launch helps with the choice.
3. Submit by hand, from your own email. Change the description a little each time so the listings aren’t identical copies.
4. Keep a sheet. Site, date, login, status, listing URL, rel of the link.
5. Check back. When a listing goes live, confirm the link as described in the guide to verifying a directory link. Tools will take a while to report it; see how long a new backlink takes to show up.

Ten listings you chose and can edit are worth more than two hundred you’ve never seen. They are also the ones where someone might reply, which no service can handle for you.

Paying for the labour can make sense when all of these hold:

• The list is short, shown in advance and made of sites you would have picked yourself.
• Submissions are made by a person, with text adapted for each site.
• You own the accounts.
• The price is for time spent, not per “dofollow link”.
• The report distinguishes submitted, approved and indexed.

If a service meets those, you are hiring an assistant for a tedious afternoon. If it doesn’t, the likely result is a spreadsheet of pages nobody visits, and at worst a pattern of links that Google’s policies describe as spam, attached to your domain.