Three hours ago I gotten my first click from Technorati in a while and I remember that years ago there were quite a few blog directories which gave me something like 30-40 uniques a day. Are there any blog directories around these days which have provided any of you with direct traffic? If so, which ones? Thanks in advance for your reply!
I'm not sure how much I trust a general blog directory that sends 30 to 40 visitors a day to its listings. That's a very high amount of traffic for directories to send out. Also, you're better off being listed in niche directories related to your site and get fewer traffic than get listed in a general one that sends you more. Focus on quality of traffic you receive more than just the numebrs
Directories don't send that much traffic to websites so if a directory (other than DMOZ, BOTW, Yahoo, etc) sends my website 40 visitors a day I would highly suspect a bot at work.
I somewhat disagree. Some of my biggest referrers are directories. Think about it like a stepping stone. Someone might be using a search engine to START their search, but they invariably get off that very quickly as the results are usually a minefield of junk. Directories can tend to rank highly for particular searches, and quite often that will lead someone to your site based on the directory listing itself. Especially if they have a particular good category(s) for the topic you are interested in. Blog directories can quite often have snippets and other details which get picked up and lead traffic to them as well.
It was my experience too that a good blog directory could send a decent bit of traffic. I'm not really seeing that much anymore but, then again, I haven't submitted my sites or participated in one in ages so it might be a decline of my own making.
Same here. A few years ago a few hundred clicks daily came from directories. Mainly blog directories and niche directories which often ranked in Google for the very terms I was targeting. Therefore my opening post requesting information whether or not there are still such directories in existence worth submitting to.
Correct me if I'm wrong: Your traffic comes from directories to your own directory or directory of directories and therefore it tends to be more targeted than general listings?
Keep in mind, my reply was talking specifically about blog directories. When my webhost isn't crashing my niche directory, it sends traffic on a daily basis to the sites listed. I HATE UPGRADES, UPDATES, SERVER FIXES!!! They break things. I get traffic from a few niche directories. Since I am not regularly submitting, I am seeing unfortunately those referrals going down as the sites become abandoned or overgrown.
Silencer makes a great point here. There's little to no accounting for the indirect referrals that directories produce. This too answers the question of those that say that no one uses a directory to perform a search. That usually do not. They use an SE which has indexed that directories listings.
Mia makes a good point. I've done searches where the snippet(s) presented provided enough info to have me refine my search and sometimes even search for something presented in the snippet. While it's usually a different keyword phrase, there have been times where it caused me to do a search for a particular site's name. I never visited the site or directory that provided the snippet or keyword nugget. But, without it, I would not have visited the site I did end up going to. There's so many things that can influence the way we search for and obtain information online. It's impossible to track a huge percentage of it. While I have always said that a quality directory can and does provide direct, measurable traffic; there's absolutely no way to measure all of the other ways it influences the visibility of the sites it lists.
How competitive of a niche are we talking about here? The only niche directories I have been seeing lately have been directories where Twitter accounts are being listed based on niche and amounts of followers. I would like to see a well ranked niche directory in action if you have one handy.
And once Google figures this out, I think we'll all be a bit further ahead of the game and more on track to cleaning up the crap in the SE results that's out there now and obtained through other less favorable methods.
In my experience, many directories almost never gave me any traffic or it was negligible. Probably, it is better to have a directory listing as a back link and not to expect any traffic out of it.
Do those links really help? I'm listed in a couple of the big directories and traffic wise I see nothing.
And with those big directories, how many other sites are listed in the same category? Many of the "big" players are not making the effort to recategorize. A listing on page 20, 40 or even 100 of a subcategory is unlikely to do a darn thing for anyone.