Top 10 directories used by online etailers, with some stats

Hello all -

Recently for work reasons I've been looking into our competitors' use of directories. We'd never really used them for our sites, except for certain niche directories specific to our market (e.g. online etail). After some recent SERP changes I decided to look into how our competitors were using them and have decided to share some of the (anonymous) information with you guys, since you all seem pretty interested in directories generally.

I got the data by picking 30 goodish ranking competitor sites generally in our area and determining from backlinks which directories in turn linked to them. In other cases I simply searched the directory (if I already knew about it) for hits for that competitor site.

This is not meant to be an accurate statistical breakdown of what directories are most popular or subscribed. The data is extremely limited, and tied to one industry. Do not take this as an endorsement or even a complete picture of the state of directories on the internet; I just had this info laying around and thought you guys might be interested.

Here's some of the info:

					    Times
Directory			PR          Used
http://www.site-sift.com	6            29
http://dir.yahoo.com		8            25
http://www.sevenseek.com	6            24
http://www.goguides.org		6            24
http://www.wowdirectory.com	5	     24
http://www.alivedirectory.com	7	     23
http://www.joeant.com		6            23
http://www.skaffe.com		5            23
http://www.beaconpost.com	5	     19
http://www.redjuniper.com	4            17 (free)
http://www.elib.org		7            16
http://www.rubberstamped.org	5	     14
http://www.linkopedia.org	5            14
http://www.botw.org		7	     12
http://www.browse8.com		5	     12
http://directory.v7n.com	7	     9
http://www.apexoo.com		5	     9
http://www.web-beacon.com	5	     7
http://www.gimpsy.com		6	     4
http://www.hedir.com		5	     3 (free but strange)
http://www.dmoz.org		8	     1 (free)

Code (markup):

First comes the directory, the directory's PR, and then the number of times that directory was used. The site-sift result may be somewhat distorted because some of the competitors are all owned by one umbrella group and site-sift seems to be their preferred directory for some reason.

Hedir is the "Human Edited DIRectory"; it is forum based, with users posting "threads" about a site and then other users voting them up or down.

Some interesting numbers follow, note that all currency is in USD and is somewhat approximate. I used the posted prices on the directory for submission, using the right submission type when I could tell (e.g. "featured" or "sponsored" if the site showed up as such), but keep in mind these aren't my sites and I have no idea what they really paid. That said there's probably some cases things were cheaper:

Total spent on all 30 sites: $23,000
Average amount spent per site on directories: $800
Average # of directories used: 12
Highest # of directories used: 18
Lowest # of directories used: 5
Highest amount spent on one site: $1200
Lowest amount spent on one site: $125

Let me know if you guys find this useful, or if you want any more information. I won't post which sites were which for obvious reasons but there's a lot of data in there still.

 

Very interesting data - thanks!

 

I find it very interesting as well, but a couple of things surprise me.

 

Great compilation of data, great job!