Do Free Directories Work?

Remember the saying that if something is FREE then there is likely to be a catch. However my question is “Do FREE Directories work”?

Now before you jump to the bottom of the page to register your comment, let me explain why I think that the majority are a complete waste of time.

OK most website owners now know that to gain a steady flow of traffic you need to be established on search engines, and with good back-links you can achieve a higher rankings on many of the major search engines.  But what makes  a good back-link, simply having your URL on some random web page is not going to cut it with the likes of Google Yahoo and Bing.  Personally I think you need much more than just a link to your website,  search engines  scan the page when adding it to the index, therefore the more information and additional deep links that are present will in my opinion give you a better quality score.

How do I know this? Well if you understand the basics of how PPC (Pay Per Click) works you will quite quickly find out that to achieve what is termed as a quality score, which basically means that you pay less for your advertising with the likes of Google if you achieve a good quality score.

To expand on this,  it’s based primarily on the relevancy of your landing page and the environment in which it lives.  Allow me to explain, if you where to run a PPC campaign and you only had one page with external links all pointing away from your page to another URL you are likely to pay much more than the person who has a number of internal pages and other relevant content. Therefore in my opinion the same rules apply to any external link to your website. Most FREE directories only offer one link back to your website, so is this enough? What do you think?