How many directories are too many directories?

[MarketingChimp10]

Hello Moz World,

I wanted to get some perspective on this. How many directories are too many directories to list a website. And what is a good Page Rank for submission.

Thanks ahead of time for all of the awesome responses.

B/R

Will H.

[donford]

Hi Will,

I'm of 2 minds when it comes to directories. My general advice would be to ignore them all together, unless there are some very industry specific ones that make sense. I say general advice because the vast majority of industries I have researched have only 1 known good directory (Dmoz.org), the rest are at best, relic sites that have basically run their course in usefulness and give little to no value in terms of traffic or link juice. Why? because it is atypical for somebody to use anything other then Google / Yahoo / Bing / Baidu to find anything on the internet.

That being said, I do place some value on directories for some specific industries and lead generation. For example, in my current industry there is a site that has been around since the 90's and many people before the rise of search engine dominance found it as a great resource for finding business to business partnerships. Many of those people who got acclimated to the site are still working today and use it as their go to source for specific project requirements. In other words they have used it for so long and it has worked for so long they never found the need to branch out and rely on search engines. And in all honesty even Google would have a hard time returning pertinent results for lets say a rubber manufacturer who has experience with over molding fda approved buna-n rubber to an aluminum substrate. But the good directory sites can list those sorts of capabilities.

Because this is a public question I had to give both my opinions on directory sites.  Again I wouldn't seek them out as any form of link building, but I also wouldn't ignore ones that seem capable of delivering either traffic or leads, I will say with the exception of Dmoz.org any of the good directories sites I have run across are very industry specific and they are certainly not free.

Hope that helps

Don

[KevinBudzynski]

Don had a great answer on this. I focus on directories that have some sort of value to the end-user and any site just can't get listed (for the company I work for is industrial B2B). If it doesn't meet these two criteria, it's most likely spammy and not worth getting listed in. I wouldn't get hung up on a set number or a specific pagerank.

[MarketingChimp10]

Thanks Kevin & Don! Your insights are very helpful. I was asking myself how much traffic would some of these "off the beaten path" directories generate, even if they had a high page rank, and if the effort was worth the reward. I think I will just list them on DMOZ and any niche specific directory my clients recommend. Thanks Again!

B/R

Will H.