Yesterday, I start my Busby SEO Test Link campaign and found out many web directories offer free listings for a reciprocal links. I found out those web directories offering reciprocal links is SUCK!!! You must get rid of these types of directories.

Why I say suck? This is what I found:

  1. First of all, You must give a link to them. By giving them a links, you have lost 1 outbound link. And if the directory is not a quality directories, you may get penalized.
  2. If you put their links at your sidebar, then you give them 100 links if you have 100 pages and 10K links if you have 10K pages while you only got 1 link.
  3. Most of those directories will have PR3 or PR4 on their homepages. But You will not get those High-PR backlink because the inner pages where your link is put is just a page with no PR crap no-quality links.
  4. Most of directories ask you to link them and after you link them you may complete your submit. But, When you hit the submit button many directories will say that they can’t detect the links on your pages although you have put it on your pages.
  5. That massage is not an error guys! It’s just a dirty trick. I believe many of you will forget to remove their links and although you have removed their links, your pages is already indexed by search engines. The links will still exist at search engine’s cache. So, you will give them one-way backlinks while you get nothing.
  6. Just like above, this times you are not getting an error massage, but the script generate error like “php out of memory“, “invalid url” or etc. And well yeah.. They got one-way links for free again because it’s cached.
  7. They won’t list your sites! I have a really quality blogs. I’m sure my blog is unique and have valuable content in it. My sites is listed on DMOZ. I submit that blogs to many directories 2 months ago and found that it’s not listed at most of those reciprocal directories. Only 10% of those sites will list your sites.
  8. You will listed but you will get “no follow” link. This type of link will not have any benefit in SEO. This type of link just give you traffic. And don’t hope from any traffic from directories because no one use them.
  9. You are listed but you will not get backlink because they use URL redirect to list your sites. Just like above, this links have no value.
  10. You are listed but you will not get any benefits because we all know that most major search engines has devalued reciprocal links or maybe won’t count this kinds of links anymore.

Not all of reciprocal web directory is crap. There are quality one that won’t cheat you. But I say, most of them are SUCK!! If you want to build backlinks, get another working methods instead of this.