I'm a little confused by the free directory and paid directory lists

On this forum, there is a sticky for the top free and top paid directories. But, the lists are all different. Some have a few directories listed, and some have thousands. Is there a way I can get the current list of the best free and best paid directories so I don't have to submit to thousands?

 

You can look at this List of Directories that you can sort based on rating, Alexa, PR, Votes or Views etc. This way you can find the top directories based on your choice.

 

The problem with any of the lists is that they are very hard to maintain. Some of the lists will include every directory they find regardless of whether or not the directory is worth even submitting to. Other lists will include some sort of rating system but today's good directory could become tomorrow's spam-filled mess.

Too many directories start out free and go paid, some look good at the beginning and get lazy, some are sold and the quality goes up or down, some are simply trolling for emails and others are just abandoned completely.

Finding and listing only the worthwhile ones would be a full-time job. There are many wonderful directories but unfortunately there are many more that are not worth supporting with your submissions.

Historically, the best list was always at Vilesilencer. But, more and more unscrupulous directory owners are gaming the list. They wait until they are accepted on the free list and then either go paid or stop maintaining their directories at the quality standards Dan requires to be on the list.

 

You can even check out Directory Critic for a list of free and paid directories.

 

Awesome list by webdev007. Thanks a lot

 

As YMC states, finding the good directories in the sea of crap is the hardest part of the job. On thing I like to do is start with directories that have a lot of traffic (high alexa rating) then check to see if the directory is getting it's traffic from google searches (ranked high in google) or if it's just webmasters submitting their site. This narrows down the list of "good" directories very quickly.

 

How do you build your list? Seems like you would have to automate at least some of your process.

 

Yeah sure. Give us a yell when your PR details are anywhere near up to date for a starter.

 

i have been using Directory Critic.. and its been giving effective and quick results to Niche marketing.

 

We let people enter their directories into our list then do an automatic PR and Alexa update when we approve it. Whenever Google updates the toolbar PR we run a mass update and get the PR and Alexa for every directory at that time.

If you're asking how we narrow our lists for doing directory submission for a specific site we use the search feature on the site to get niche directories first sorted by Alexa rating. With that list we take some "relevant" and "modestly competitive" text from the page were we'll be listed and see how well it ranks in the SERPs. If it is ranked then we consider that a very good directory. If not, we see if it ranks for the title of the page. That's our fall back for believing the directory will pass some link juice. We also do the same thing for general directories. Basically, we've found that starting with Alexa then confirming with the SERPs is much faster than starting with high PR (or any other criteria).

 

I just went through an exercise looking for good directories to submit a couple of sites.

Started with 84 PR6 directories on a directory list.

Eliminated obvious dropped domain sites.
Eliminated directories that wanted a yearly fee
Eliminated directories that had lost PR since submitting their site to the list and reported same to list manager.
Eliminated directories that had no inner page PR - all reasonable directories have inner page PR, at least in the upper level.
Eliminated directories whose charges were above $40.00 - the absolute limit for myself.
Eliminated directories that when you searched for their domain name, Google did not display sitelinks - Sitelinks prove that Google values the directory.

So I was left with 1 directory for 3 hours work. Not a very long list at all in the end,

 

vmoption.com there you can get paid directories, free directories and bid directories.

 

vmoptions dot com is the best free directory website. There are lots of directories with high pr. which will help you to improve your keyword ranking