Hi Chris. I have a website that I have been submiting to a bunch of free directories. However, lately I have been hearing about directories not being as valuable as they once where. What are your thoughts on this and would posting links in forums be a good alternative?
- Paul

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the great question! I’m not a huge fan of directories myself. While I still continue to use them, I’m becoming more and more picky about the ones I waste my time submitting my websites to. I still believe we should continue to submit to directories, if only because of how easy and quick it is with the right software.

Using something like RoboForm or a semi-automated directory submission program, I can submit to a directory in under 30 seconds. While the best directories have a waiting period before your site will get added, once I hit submit all I have to do is sit back and wait.

But more and more I am beginning to like community forums. It take a bit more research to find the good ones, but it’s well worth the effort. My biggest complaint with forums, is that they usually have more rules and less structure (if that makes any sense) then a directory or static web page.

You can’t just sign up and start linking on a lot of forums. You first have to build a reputation by posting a certain amount of times before links in your signature become active - and many forum administers will ban your account and remove your postings if you link to often.

On top of that, most of the SEO related and high traffic forums either make use of the No Follow tag, making links nearly useless, or have such a high outbound links per page ratio that the forum becomes virtually useless for link building purposes. Still, some forums are gold mines and it’s foolish for any SEO to forget about them completely.

I love very small niche forums that been around for years. I remember joining a forum for knife fanatics, and while links in a signature were allowed & followed, the audience in general wasn’t very net savvy. As a result, the pages had very little wasted link juice. Even better was that many of the forum’s posts showed up in the search engine results pages (SERPs). And by being active in a few forums, you not only get a few link backs to your website, but you also build brand awareness.

I can’t tell you how many times I been contacted because I helped someone on a forum and the person just liked me. Building trust and brand awareness is something I value much more then any link back could provide.

My advice is that we should all be looking at forums the same way as directories. The same old rules apply: when was it last crawled, are the internal pages ranking, how does it relate to your site, etc etc. And don’t just stick to directories and forums… you also got blogs and social media sites worth looking at.

Thanks again Paul for your awesome question!

To my readers: Do you ever find yourself looking for reviews on a product and stumble onto a forum? If so, what’s your typical reaction? Do you click the back button or do you give it a read and follow the links?

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