Over the years, I have submitted to hundreds of different directories. I have always felt it was a good investment of time and a great thing to do when getting a new forum off the ground. Commonly people talk about DMOZ and the greatness of it, but I stopped submitting to them more than 1 year ago. It is a directory where only a more established forum will have a chance of getting in anyways, and this doesn’t help a brand new forum. You also have to consider the fact that when submitting, you may not get in for a period of months….if ever.
On Friday I decided to do a few directory submissions myself. Rex and I are working hard on a major transition with our Cruise Forum being moved to the new domain with a completely new look and feel to it. I figured a solid directory listing would be a good thing on the SEO front. The submission was already online over the weekend, so the turn around time was fast. If you are looking for a solid directory with a good page rank, then I would recommend Site Sift as a fantastic choice. Whether you are looking for free or paid placements I think they can offer you good ROI which is very important to any webmaster trying to get a new forum off the ground.
I was just doing directory submission yesterday, it was pretty tiring after 100 or so.
Anyways, DMOZ still provides exceedingly valuable links, but as always, the links that are most valuable are the hardest to get. I wouldn’t bother submitting just an empty forum, but if you have some high quality articles or something else of value, you are in a way better position to get in.
Same goes for Yahoo directory, wich is arguably even more valuable and even more difficult to get in (for free).
Started a forum three weeks ago. Never subbmitted to DMOZ. Yesterday i started geting links form DMOZ. I dont know how that happened. I only have about 80 posts.
I guess you never know!
A bit off topic, but the old design of CLF was much better - also didn’t Rex post a while back that vbSEO was removed from CLF, so why was it put back on? I’m interested in hearing the reasoning behind this due to his post so strongly against it at the time.
Michael the change in design was much needed. While the old style worked fine it was much too jumbled and “busy” and wasn’t the best to navigate. It sure was pretty though but sometimes functionality over looks goes a long way!
As for the vBSEO we have previously installed it mid-way on the old domain and it was b/c of that it didn’t do so well. And since with our newest change we changed domains I felt it was a good choice to try it from scratch. Not to mention I think our domain was flagged for whatever reason as we got about 1% of our traffic from SEs.
In the we are trying to just to move ahead
I also found it easy to get cubsforums.com into DMOZ. I think it was in over the weekend. After that, I jumped straight to the first page of google. It hasn’t translated into a ton of membership yet, but I’m sure it will be valuable over the long run.