Directory links with no follow

[BeckyKey]

Hi

I'm researching competitor backlinks & they have a lot of directory links which are no follow - but they rank very well.

Is this type of link building even allowed by google? I know they they aren't allowed followed directory links, but will no following them help with rankings?

[JordanLowry]

If they are high-quality directories that are relevant within their niche then they would offer some benefit I would imagine. If they are low-quality directories I know Google devalues those links.

[BeckyKey]

Thanks!

I'll take a look - for Google I'm guessing it should still be a no follow?

[JordanLowry]

There are some directories that can be follow like dmoz and yahoo directory. But using directories as a linkbuilding tactic is not a good idea. What tool are you using to spy on your competitors backlinks?

[BeckyKey]

I'm using SEMRush.

Yeh I don't agree with directories & I'm trying to find some niche blogs but it's a bit of a struggle.

I came across all their directory links and just wondered why it was working so well for them!

[JordanLowry]

Maybe they are using really niche directories that are relevant to their industry. That could be a possibility,however this might help:

"Your Industry" + intitle:“write for us”
"Your Industry" + intitle:“guest post”
"Your Industry"+ intitle:“contribute to”
"Your Industry" + intitle:“submit” + inurl:blog
inpostauthor:guest + "Your Industry"
inpostauthor:”guest blog” + "Your Industry"
inpostauthor:”guest post” + "Your Industry"

[BeckyKey]

Great thank you, it's a time consuming process

[JordanLowry]

It is super time consuming. Another idea I did and it worked fairly well and got me some success was using epicbeat.epictions.com to source for links. They have a free version of their platform too so all I did was input a broad search term related to my nice. Then I pulled a few of the top performing content pieces that I thought I could write and bring a unique perspective into it. I took those url's and ran them through SEM rush or another software to see who was linking to it and built an excel sheet with metrics such as, PA, DA and contact information.

Give that a try too and see if you have any success.

hope that helps some.

[BeckyKey]

Cool, that sounds like a good idea I haven't tried!

Will give it a go, thanks for your help!

[GastonRiera]

In adition to Jordan's comment:

Those footprints can be easily searched by a scraper.
I've found many blogs where to place comments or guest posts.

The trick is to find any related term/text that appears in all sites that you might find  relevant.
I used GScraper, with about 10 footprints and a few hours of running, it found over 10k results. Then filter by HTTP status (leaving 200), then remove duplicates, and so on.
The list came to about 100 URLs, and using Netpeack checker, you can get their metrics easily.

A little black hat

Best Luck

[BeckyKey]

Hi

Thanks for this, I haven't used a scraper before, I'll have a look at it thanks