I submitted my product to a lot of directories over the past few weeks. Then I measured what those listings
actually gave me, and the answer was worse than the page count suggested: twenty four listings
across twenty one domains, and five links a search engine would follow.
I assumed the other sixteen were nofollow out of habit, or caution, or because that is what
platforms do now. Then one of them sent me an email that explained the whole thing in one sentence,
and I realised I had the causality backwards.
The sentence
I have a launch scheduled on a directory next week. Their reminder email included this:
Free launches that finish below 10 go back to the waiting line and their backlink becomes
nofollow.
Read that again as a statement about pricing rather than about spam. The link is not nofollow
because they distrust me. It is nofollow because I have not earned it yet, and there is a published
threshold at which it converts. Ten upvotes.
That is not a policy about link quality. It is a product with a price, and the price happens to be
denominated in attention rather than money.
Once you see it, it is everywhere
A second directory emailed me a few days earlier offering their badge for my site. The pitch listed
three benefits, and the third was the real one:
After 50 external badge views, a dofollow link from your [...] listing back to your site.
I measured my listing on that site the same hour. The outbound link to me carries
rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow". So they are not offering a bonus. They are holding something
back and naming its price: fifty views of their badge, placed on my own site.
A third directory offers two ways to launch: free with a verified badge on your site, or a
two-figure fee to skip the queue and pick your own date. Same structure, two currencies.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to write this as an accusation and it is not
one. All three of those offers are stated openly, on their own pages, in their own emails. Nobody
is hiding anything. They are businesses, the traffic they send is real, and the editorial work of
running a directory is not free. This is just what the product is.
What that means for the sixteen
My original question was why sixteen of my twenty one domains give nothing. I had been treating it
as a quality signal, as though those sites had looked at my product and decided it did not merit a
followed link.
The likelier explanation is duller and more useful: the followed link is the thing they sell. A
free listing gets you a page. The page is real, it is indexable, it will rank for your product name.
What it will not do is pass anything, because passing something is the paid tier.
I checked this against the five that do give me a followed link, expecting to find that none of them
sell anything. Four of them have never sent me a commercial email of any kind. The fifth sells
advertising and a directory-submission service aggressively, and gives me a followed link anyway.
So the rule is not universal, and I am not going to pretend it is. One clean counterexample out of
five is enough to say: this explains a lot of cases, not all of them.
The part that is actually decidable
I am not going to buy any of it, and the reason is not budget.
A followed link obtained by placing that site's badge on mine is a reciprocal arrangement. That is
the textbook definition of a link scheme, and it is the specific thing search engines discount when
they find it. Paying for it with a badge does not make it a different thing than paying for it with
money; it just moves the payment to a place where it is visible to everyone including the search
engine.
The upvote threshold is different and I think it is fine. Ten people choosing your product on
launch day is not a purchase, it is a signal, and a directory using it to decide who gets a followed
link is doing something defensible. I will probably not reach ten, because reaching it means asking
people to go and click, and I do not have a list of people to ask. That is a real consequence of
having no audience yet, and it is not something a rule change on their side would fix.
What I would tell someone starting a directory campaign
Count links, not listings. Twenty four pages sounded like progress until I ran the check. Five
followed links is the honest number, and it took one script and an afternoon.
Read the pricing page before the submission form. The submission form never tells you what tier
of link you are getting. The pricing page usually does, in the small print of what the paid plan
includes.
Treat a free page as a free page. It is worth having. It ranks for your name, it exists when
someone looks you up, and it costs an hour. Just do not put it in the column marked backlinks.
Do not buy the upgrade with your own homepage. Money is at least honest. A reciprocal badge is
the version that damages the thing you were trying to build.
The uncomfortable symmetry
There is a version of this post that is indignant, and I keep deleting it, because the numbers do
not support it.
I asked these sites for something free, on the strength of nothing. No audience, no traffic to send
them, no reason for them to care. They gave me a real page, indexed, with my product name and
description on it, and they kept the part that costs them something. That is not exploitation. It
is roughly what I would have done.
The lesson is not that directories are stingy. It is that I had built a plan on an asset I never
verified I had.
Disclosure
I build BlueTicks for Gmail, a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows WhatsApp style ticks in your
Gmail sent list, one tick sent and two blue ticks opened. It costs 4 dollars a year and there is a
free tier. The measurements above come from submitting it to directories and then checking what the
listings actually did, which is a step I skipped for the first two weeks. You can find it at
blueticks.io.
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