We research and add the majority of our listings ourselves.  If we have missed your site we will gladly add it for free. Our only criteria is that the website is a directory with some type of submission process. We do not list adult directories. Please note that lower quality directories may be given a nofollow attribute.

To have your directory considered for inclusion in our list of directories simply add a comment below using this format:

• URL*:

• Type*: (e.g. general, webmaster, blogs, USA, German language)

• Cost*: Free, Paid or Reciprocal

Note: in our book, a free directory provides “dofollow” listings without requiring anything in return

Example

• URL*: abctraveldirectory.net
  

• Type*: Niche / Travel

• Cost*: Free

In order to identify automated submissions only comments in the above format will be reviewed.. We usually add sites every 5-10 days.

To submit, click the comments link below.

Note:  A small percentage of users have reported a blank screen when they try to add a comment. We suspect that these people are getting caught in the blog’s Askimet spam software. If you receive a blank screen please use our contact form to email your information. This post replaces the previous submit post.

There is nothing inherently wrong with .info Directories. The problem is how they have been abused by certain people in the directory industry. .info domains can be registered for about $1 for the first year but future years cost around $10 per year. A high percentage of .info directories disappear before their 2nd year. The subject was discussed recently at DP forum.

Here are some of the funnier comments.

these nutcases are buying the domains in bulk and churning directories like bunnies

cheap domains for cheap directories. nothing new here. quick buck crew trying to create an empire of poop!

.info Directories = I’m a moron following the moron ahead of me into failure.

The only difference between *.info and rest is that 99% of the *.info directories will be dead in 1 year. Other than that there is no difference.

Today a directory owner admitted to owning 2500 directories. So, someone pays a buck for a .info domain, uses a free script, a dump of categories and hosts a wad of them on the same server. They have created a network of identical, poor quality directories on a couple of IPs. The problem is that a small proportion of these (if any) will be around in a year or two.

I pity people with legitimate .info directories. They will be prejudiced because of the color of their extension.

Is it possible that the .info behavior can harm all directories. You bet! 

Should we do something about it.  Yes we should!

Bing has  released  some useful link building tips on their blog.  The information provided gives some detailed information on how the search engines handle attempts to manipulate search results.  I would be fairly certain that Google follows pretty similar logic.

Content

Bing starts by repeating the same that Google has said for years.

“The webmasters who create end user value within their websites, based on the needs of people, are the ones who will see their page rank improve. So where does that value come from? Content. Good, original, text-based content”

Relevancy

 The importance links from relevant sites is explained.

Authority sites

 Bing explains that links from the most highly regarded, relevant sites are best.

Unnatural Links

Bing then explains that patterns of unnatural links activity can trigger a manual review of a website. They look at:

“the relationships between linked sites, the changes to links over time, which sites link to one another, and so much more”.

“When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction. If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index.”

They then provide some examples of activity that can get you in trouble.  Most of them were old news but two of them are important.

• The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time
• Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites

Suggestions for Getting Legitimate Links. 

The blog post then provides some hints on how to get what they call “good, legitimate inbound links”. Here is what Bing suggests:

• Develop your site as a business brand and be consistent about that branding in your content
• Identify relevant industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers, and media people and let them know about your site and its content
• Write and publish concise, informative press releases online as developments warrant
• Publish expert articles to online article directories
• Participate in relevant blogs and forums and refer back to your site’s content when applicable (Note that some blogs and forums add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to links created in user-generated content (UGC). While creating links to your content in these locations won’t automatically create backlinks for search engines, readers who click through and like what they find may create outbound links to your site, and those are good.)
• Use social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to connect to industry influencers to establish contacts, some of whom may connect back to you (be sure you have your profiles set up with links back to your website first)
• Create an online newsletter on your site with e-mail subscription notifications
• Launch a blog or interactive user forum on your site*
• Join and participate in relevant industry associations and especially in their online forums
• Ultimately, strive to become a trusted expert voice for your industry and let people know that your website contains your published wit and wisdom

Even I was surprised that they recommend submitting to article directories. I was starting to believe that article directories where less relevant. Matt Cutts - could you please confirm this statement.  I’ll have to spend more time on our list of 750 article directories.

I believe that Google has led the way with this type of detection.  They would also use these types of methods to identify paid links. They See the complete article of Bing link building tips.

Yes it took a while but PR has finally been updated on our directory list. I apologize for the delay.  For years, I ran a program that ran through the database and updated the PR.  As a result of some Google changes this program recently stopped working.  To make matters worse, the writer of the program was no longer supporting it.

I searched around for a while but did not find anything to update the PageRank.  Finally, I was able to test a program from David at PHPLD that ran on my own machine. This program worked, but it’s results were far from perfect.  The good news that it updated the high PR well.  The bad news is that I received almost a thousand inaccurate PRs of NA (-1).  I then spent 4 days going through all the NA PRs to verify them.  On the brighter side, it gave me a chance to look at many of the directories that don’t get reviewed very often. I removed many dead directories or sites that are no longer directories. Unfortunately, I did not look at all of them.  I skipped many directories that had less change of having PR, such as sites where the directory is a sub-folder (e.g. abc.com/directory).

In the coming weeks, I will be working through improving the data further. If you see a site with inaccurate PR please help me out by filling in a report. Thanks in advance.

Google updated their toolbar PageRank last week.   So far I have not noticed any substantial changes for directories (either good or bad).  As usual, some went up and some went down.

I have not updated the PR of the our complete list of directories.  Because of Google changes, the tool the site uses to automatically update PR is no longer functional.  We have been searching for alternatives for the last couple of months. For now, I have manually updated PR from the top listings in the most popular categories.

There are way too many directories with the exact same categories.  Over the last 3 months I estimate that 9 out of 10 new general directories are using the same category dump.  The result is a slew of low quality directories.

Here is an example of one of these directories.  You will recognize it because the first 5 categories are: Arts, Blogs, Business, Computers and Education.

Here is an example of Arts sub-category.

There are over a thousand of these directories on the web.  This is not the only dump that people use but it is by far the one used the most.

Owners usually create a dozen or two of these exact directories.  Sometimes they create a hundred or two.  To make things worse, they often host all the directories on the same IP.

Advice to anyone starting a directory

Create one good directory rather than a dozen crappy ones. Create some original categories and try to build some original content. The more useful the content is the better. Good luck.

UPDATE  Jan 27, 2010 - Because of the number of comments (over 350), this post has been replaced by a new one.  Please use this new submission link.  

Have your site listed in our directory of directories for free. Our only criteria is that the directory should have some type of submission process. We also do not list adult directories. Please note that lower quality directories may be given a nofollow attribute.

To have your directory considered for inclusion in our list of directories simply add a comment to this post in the following format:

• URL*:

• Type*: (e.g. general, travel, blogs, USA, Spanish language)

• Cost*: Free, Paid or Reciprocal (a free directory provides “dofollow” listings without requiring anything in return).

• Comment: Include a very short description if there is something about the directory that sets it apart.

Example

• URL*: afreedirectory.net
  

• Type*: General

• Cost*: Free

In order to reduce automated submissions only comments in the above format will be reviewed. Add as many as you want in a post. We usually add sites every 10 days unless high volumes warrant quicker updates.

Click the comments link below.

Note: This post replaces the previous submision post. A small percentage of users have reported a blank screen when they try to add a comment. We suspect that these people are getting caught in the blog’s Askimet spam software. If you receive a blank screen please use our contact form to email your information.

 We have just completed some major upgrades to our list of Australian Directories.  The category as listings from Australia and Oceana.  We have done some good research and found almost 100 new directories.  We have also added a couple of sub-categories for niche and regional listings.  The information is now very current.

New Zealand directories are also included in a separate category.  There are now 150 Australia and 34 New Zealand listings.

If you have an Australian or New Zealand directory post a comment below and we will gladly add it to the list. Include the following information:

• URL*:

• Type*: (e.g. general, travel, real estate, blog)

• Cost*: Free, Paid or Reciprocal (a free directory provides “dofollow” listings without requiring  something in return).

We have just updated our list of Free Deep Link Directories  over on our sister site Best-Web-Directories.com.  For the first time, this list has directories that have approved our submissions.  These are directories that have approved our submissions over the last 2 weeks from our deep link submission service.  There are 60  free general directories on the list.

Deep links are backlinks to internal pages of your site.  We feel that these are important as natural growth of links would have both links to your homepage and links to your internal pages.

Web-Directories.ws has reached the 13,000 directory listing mark. We have reached this mark despite our effort to concentrate on quality rather than quantity. For many months the size of the database actually shrunk as we deleted hundreds of directories that were parked. We had to do a manual review as most of these do not get kicked out when we use the automated tool to validate links. We attacked the listings in various manual and automated manners to clean it up. The information is as current as it will ever get.

Just this week we added an additional 300 free directories to raise the total to 3000 free directories. We also added over a hundred article directories.

Over the last year we have added thousands of new niche and regional directories. These seem to be doing well based on our latest Pagerank statistics.

I would like to thank our increasing loyal users who send in directory reports to identify inappropriate and mis-categorized directories. Thank you and I hope to hear from you.