You’re an SEO, and you are considering your link building strategy for the day, then all of a sudden you receive an e-mail from a friend or colleague, with a list of directories they would recommend you use.  You browse through the list and visit a few of the sites, discovering that they are all free directories all with relatively low (I know it is a sin to say it but) PR.  You spend the rest of your day adding your site to all of these directories, and it quite literally takes you hours, at the end of it you are left wondering, “Was that really worth it”?

There are a few reasons why you start to think this, and you begin to ponder about the actual importance that any of those links will have on your site.  So why is it that you feel as though this may not work?  Well there are a number of different ideas for this:

· That the directories that you have submitted to can take up to 2 weeks to respond to your request, and some of the time never get back to you at all, and you just wasted a days worth of link building.

· The directories that you have submitted to although free all have such a small amount of power that your site, even if accepted to the directory will never get crawled.

· Some free directory get no followed.  I admit this very rarely happens but I have seen it before.

· You come to the realization that although you have done about a hundred of these that they are unbelievably “shitty” links that they won’t actually do anything for your site.

However as with every story there is a flip side to an equation.  This may be quite a laborious and manual piece of work, but it does still offer the promise of generating you links. So what are the advantages and do they outweigh the negative points of Free Directory link building?

· First of all once you have a list together, you can rely on that to be your master list, you won’t need to find the directories that do or don’t work or submit quickly you already have it for other clients.

· Next is that, these are still links, let’s not forget that and most of the time they are anchor text, so Chocks away dear boy!

· More importantly in my opinion, is that all of these sites are different domains, and not only that they will be on different IP addresses.  So Links + IP + Domains can’t possibly = bad result!

Basically the hard part is finding the directories that work.  Those that do are definitely worth submitting to.  And for one client or yourself it is a one off, you just need to make a decision about whether or not it is worth your time?

Marcus is Typically a Travel SEO, working with   Caribbean holidays tour operators, he enjoys blogging about experiences and what he learns in day to day life.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily lease-a-seo.com

More information on getting an excellent directory submission done with only the best directory sites carefully hand selected..can be found here on our s directory submission service page.