How to Choose Directories Worth Submitting To

The second article in this series ended on a verdict with a condition attached, and the condition was selectivity: directory submission is worth doing only when it is done to directories that have a genuine audience and genuine standards, and is worth nothing, or less than nothing, when it is not. That condition turns the choice of directories from a preliminary detail into the central task. This article is about making that choice well. It explains why the choice is the whole of the activity, sets out the single question that matters most, describes the marks of a directory worth submitting to and the marks of one to avoid, explains why editorially controlled directories are the ones search engines treat with relative trust, and offers a practical method for vetting a directory before a submission is made. The companion business-directory series treated the related question of choosing a directory to be listed in; this article approaches the matter from the submission side and may be read alongside it, but it does not repeat it.

The standard note on sources applies: peer-reviewed research is cited by author and year and listed at the end, and claims that rest on search-marketing practice rather than formal research are identified as such.

Why the choice of directory is the whole game

It is worth establishing, before any practical advice, why the choice of directory carries the entire weight of the activity, because an owner who does not see this will treat the choice as a quick first step rather than as the thing itself. The previous articles established that every benefit directory submission still offers — direct discovery, local-search citation, referral traffic, a contribution to the machine-readable record, a measure of credibility — is a benefit conferred by the directory, not by the act of submitting. A submission to a directory with a real audience confers all of them; a submission to a directory with no audience confers none of them, and the act of submitting is, in the second case, simply wasted, since the form was filled in and sent to no effect. This is the asymmetry that makes the choice decisive. The act of submission is nearly the same act whichever directory it is aimed at; the outcomes diverge completely, and they diverge entirely on the quality of the target. The activity called directory submission is therefore, properly understood, not the act of submitting at all. It is the act of choosing, with the submission a minor administrative consequence of a choice already made well or badly. An owner who internalizes this will spend their effort where it belongs — on assessing directories — and will stop measuring the activity by the number of submissions made, a number that, on its own, says nothing about whether anything of value was achieved.

The single question that matters most

If the choice of directory is the whole game, an owner needs a way to make it, and the most useful thing this article can offer is a single question that does most of the work: does this directory have a real audience of human beings who consult it? Every legitimate benefit of a listing depends, directly or indirectly, on the answer. Direct discovery depends on it by definition. Referral traffic depends on it, since traffic comes only from people who use the directory. The local-search citation value depends on it less obviously but no less really, because the directories whose citations corroborate a business’s details are the directories the search systems themselves regard as worth consulting, and a directory no one uses is not, in the end, such a directory. Even the credibility benefit depends on it, since a listing borrows credibility only from a directory that has credibility to lend, and a directory has credibility only if it is a genuine, used resource. The audience question is therefore not one test among several; it is the test, and the other marks discussed below are best understood as ways of answering it when it cannot be answered directly.

Answering it directly is sometimes possible and should be attempted first. A directory that is genuinely used tends to show it: it has the character of a resource maintained for readers, its listings are reasonably current, and an owner can often form a fair judgement simply by using the directory as a searcher would and asking whether the experience is that of a real, helpful catalogue or that of an empty shell. Where direct judgement is uncertain, the indirect marks below come into play. But the owner should keep the single question in view throughout, because all the detail that follows is in service of it: a directory is worth submitting to when, and only when, real people use it.

The marks of a directory worth submitting to

Several observable features tend to accompany a directory that has a genuine audience, and an owner can use them, in combination, to judge a directory that cannot be assessed at a glance. None is decisive alone; together they are reasonably reliable.

It exercises editorial selection

The first and most telling mark is that the directory exercises editorial selection — that it reviews what is submitted to it and is willing to reject. A directory that admits everything submitted to it, automatically and without review, is telling an owner something important about itself: that it has no standard, and therefore that inclusion in it signifies nothing, since a listing that anything can obtain distinguishes a business from nothing. A directory that reviews submissions, applies criteria, and turns away what does not meet them is, by the same logic, telling the owner that its listings mean something, because they have been filtered. Editorial selection is also, as a later section explains, the feature that gives a directory standing with search engines. An owner assessing a directory should therefore look for evidence of a review process — a stated set of inclusion criteria, a submission that is considered rather than instantly published, signs that the existing listings have been curated rather than merely accumulated — and should treat its presence as a strong point in the directory’s favour and its absence as a serious mark against.

It is built to be consulted, not merely to be sold

The second mark concerns who the directory is really for. A genuine directory is built for the searchers who consult it, and its design, its organization, and its energy are directed at being useful to them. A directory that is not genuine is built for the businesses it sells listings to, and its energy is directed at recruitment; the searcher, in such a directory, is an afterthought or a fiction. The difference is usually visible. A directory built to be consulted reads, when an owner uses it as a searcher, like a resource: it is organized for finding things, its categories are sensible, its listings are informative. A directory built to be sold reads like a sales operation that happens to have a catalogue attached: its most prominent messages are addressed to prospective listers rather than to searchers, and its apparent purpose is the recruitment of paying businesses rather than the service of anyone looking. An owner should ask, plainly, of any directory: when I look at this, does it seem to be for the people searching, or for the people being sold to? The honest answer is a good guide to whether the directory has the audience that gives a listing its worth.

It shows signs of being maintained

The third mark is maintenance. A directory with a genuine audience is, almost always, a directory someone keeps up: its listings are reasonably current, defunct businesses are removed rather than left to mislead, and the catalogue gives the general impression of being tended. A directory that has been abandoned — whose listings are visibly old, whose categories contain businesses that have plainly closed, whose content has the staleness of something no one has touched in years — is unlikely to have a living audience, because a resource no one maintains is usually a resource no one uses, the two conditions tending to arrive together. Maintenance is therefore a useful proxy for audience, and it is one an owner can assess fairly quickly by looking at whether the directory’s content seems current.

It is relevant to the business

The fourth mark is not a measure of the directory’s quality in the abstract but of its fit with the particular business, and it matters because a directory can be excellent and still be the wrong directory. A directory’s relevance to a business has two aspects: topical relevance, the degree to which the directory’s subject aligns with the business’s industry, and geographic relevance, the degree to which the directory’s coverage aligns with the area the business serves. A first-rate niche directory of an industry the business is not in, or a well-run local directory of a place the business does not serve, offers that business little, however good it is on its own terms, because the audience it reaches is not the business’s potential audience. An owner choosing among genuine directories should therefore weight relevance heavily, preferring the directory whose subject and territory match the business over a directory that is larger or better known but less aligned.

The marks of a directory to avoid

The directory worth avoiding is, in most respects, simply the inverse of the directory worth submitting to, but it is worth describing in its own right, because its features form a recognizable pattern and an owner who knows the pattern can dismiss such a directory quickly. The directory to avoid is the one that admits everything, automatically, with no review and no standard; the one that has no discernible audience of searchers, reading as an empty catalogue rather than a used resource; the one whose entire visible purpose is the recruitment of paying businesses, addressing itself far more to prospective listers than to anyone searching; and, very often, the one that advertises its own indiscriminateness as though it were a benefit, promising submission to vast numbers of directories at once, or instant inclusion, or listing without review. That last feature deserves emphasis, because it is the clearest single signal. A directory or a service that promotes the sheer quantity of listings it can produce, or the speed and ease with which it can produce them, is advertising precisely the property — indiscriminate, unreviewed inclusion — that the previous articles identified as worthless and potentially harmful. The promise of bulk is not a feature; it is a warning, and an owner who treats it as a warning will avoid most of what is worth avoiding. Research on the abuse of listing platforms confirms that fraudulent and low-quality entries are a real and studied phenomenon (Huang et al., 2017), and the directories that make such abuse easy are exactly the indiscriminate ones; avoiding them is not excessive caution but ordinary prudence.

Why editorial directories are the ones search engines trust

The recurring emphasis on editorial selection deserves a direct explanation, because it is also the answer to a question an owner may have met in the phrase “editorial directories and why Google trusts them.” The explanation is consistent with everything the series has argued and contains nothing mysterious. A search engine, in deciding how much to regard a directory and the listings within it, faces the same problem a searcher faces: it cannot directly verify the directory’s quality, and must judge it by observable signals. Editorial selection is the strongest available signal that a directory is genuine, for the same reason it is the strongest signal to a human assessor: a directory that reviews and rejects has demonstrated a standard, and a standard is the thing an indiscriminate directory conspicuously lacks. A directory that controls what it admits is also, by construction, resistant to the manipulation that made link-era directories worthless — it cannot be filled with junk by anyone who chooses to fill it, because it does not admit junk — and a search engine has good reason to regard a resource that cannot be trivially manipulated more highly than one that can.

This is why editorial control recurs, in the research on organized web resources, as the defining feature of the directories and gateways considered trustworthy: the literature on quality-controlled subject gateways treats human editorial selection as the very thing that distinguishes a reliable catalogue from an unreliable one (Koch, 2000). The point for an owner is practical and can be stated simply. A listing in an editorial directory is worth more — to searchers, to local-search corroboration, and to whatever regard a search engine extends to the directory — than a listing in an indiscriminate one, and it is worth more precisely because the editorial directory rejected other submissions, including, potentially, submissions like the owner’s own. The selectivity that makes such a directory harder to get into is the same selectivity that makes being in it mean something. An owner should therefore regard a directory’s editorial standards not as an obstacle but as the source of the value, and should prefer, every time, the directory that might say no.

A practical method for vetting a directory before you submit

The marks described above can be gathered into a short, repeatable procedure that an owner can apply to any directory in a few minutes, and applying it before every submission is the discipline this whole article recommends. The procedure is to use the directory as a searcher before ever approaching it as a lister. An owner should visit the directory and look for the business’s own kind of provider within it: search the relevant category, in the relevant area, and ask whether the result is the experience of a useful catalogue — sensible categories, informative listings, results that seem current — or the experience of an empty or stale shell. They should look, specifically, for whether a competitor would be found there, because a directory in which the business’s competitors are well represented and well presented is a directory in which the business itself plausibly belongs, while a directory containing no real providers of the relevant kind is unlikely to repay a submission. They should look at the quality of the listings themselves, since careful, complete listings suggest a maintained resource and careless, thin ones suggest an abandoned one.

They should then look at how the directory presents itself, asking whether its prominent messages address searchers or prospective listers, and treating heavy recruitment messaging, promises of bulk or instant inclusion, and an apparent absence of any review process as the warning signs the previous sections identified. Where a fee is involved, they should read the terms before agreeing — the cost, the duration, and the renewal arrangement — for the reasons the companion series set out. The procedure ends with the single question this article began from, now informed by everything the few minutes of inspection revealed: on the evidence, does this directory have a real audience of people who consult it? If the honest answer is yes, and the directory is relevant to the business, a submission is warranted; if the answer is no or cannot be reached with any confidence, the directory should be set aside, and the owner should feel no obligation to submit to it merely because it exists and accepts submissions. The method is not elaborate, and that is deliberate: it is meant to be quick enough to apply every time, because a quick method actually used is worth far more than a thorough one that is not.

Table 1. A directory worth submitting to, and a directory to avoid

The place of paid directories in the choice

A word is owed to the question of payment, because an owner applying the method above will meet directories that charge and will want to know how the charge bears on the choice. The short answer, developed more fully in the companion business-directory series, is that whether a directory charges is, in itself, neither a mark in its favour nor a mark against it. A fee does not make a directory genuine; an indiscriminate directory can charge, and a charge does not supply the audience or the editorial standard the fee-taker lacks. Equally, a fee does not make a directory suspect; many genuine directories, particularly niche and professional ones, charge a reasonable fee because a real audience and a real editorial process cost something to maintain, and the previous series argued that such a fee can be entirely fair value. The point is that payment is simply not the axis on which the choice should be made. The axis is the one this article has described throughout: audience, editorial selection, maintenance, relevance. An owner should apply the vetting method to a paid directory exactly as to a free one, judge it on those criteria, and only then, if the directory passes, treat the fee as a separate question of value for money, weighed in the manner the companion series set out. A paid directory that passes the vetting may well be worth its fee; a paid directory that fails it is not worth anything, and the fee is irrelevant to that conclusion.

Concluding remarks

Because every benefit directory submission still offers is conferred by the directory and not by the act of submitting, the choice of directory is not a preliminary to the activity; it is the activity, and an owner who sees this will spend their effort assessing directories rather than counting submissions. The choice turns on a single question — does this directory have a real audience of people who consult it? — and the observable marks of a directory worth submitting to are all, in the end, ways of answering it: editorial selection, a purpose directed at searchers rather than at recruitment, signs of genuine maintenance, and relevance to the particular business. The directory to avoid is the inverse, and its clearest single signal is the advertisement of its own indiscriminateness, the promise of bulk or instant inclusion that announces precisely the worthless property to steer clear of. Editorial directories are the ones search engines treat with relative trust for the same reason they are the ones worth an owner’s submission: editorial selection is the strongest signal of a genuine resource and the property that makes a directory resistant to manipulation. The practical method is to inspect a directory as a searcher before approaching it as a lister, quickly and every time. Payment does not enter the choice as a criterion; audience, standards, maintenance, and relevance decide it, and the fee, where there is one, is a separate question taken up only once the directory has passed. Chosen this way, directories are few, considered, and worth the submission; chosen any other way, they are many and worth nothing.

Future developments

The skill of choosing directories well is likely to remain necessary, and may become slightly easier, in the years ahead. It will remain necessary because the indiscriminate directory has not disappeared and will not: as long as some businesses can be persuaded that bulk submission helps, there will be directories built to receive it, and the burden of telling the genuine resource from the empty one will continue to fall on the owner. It may become easier because the same developments that are raising the value of accurate, structured directory data are also raising the cost, to a directory, of being worthless: a directory with no audience and no standards has less and less to offer as discovery comes to depend more on corroborated, machine-readable records, and the population of such directories may, over time, thin further as their last rationale fades. The likely future is therefore one in which the choice still has to be made but the field of candidates is gradually clearer — fewer directories pretending, more of the survivors genuine. The criteria in this article are not expected to change, because they are not tied to any current state of the web; audience, editorial selection, maintenance, and relevance are what have made a directory worth joining for as long as directories have existed, and an owner who chooses by them is choosing by the things that last.

References

Akerlof, G. A. (1970). The market for “lemons”: Quality uncertainty and the market mechanism. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84(3), 488–500.

Hagiu, A., & Wright, J. (2015). Multi-sided platforms. International Journal of Industrial Organization, 43, 162–174.

Koch, T. (2000). Quality-controlled subject gateways: Definitions, typologies, empirical overview. Online Information Review, 24(1), 24–34.

Stigler, G. J. (1961). The economics of information. Journal of Political Economy, 69(3), 213–225.