How We Submitted Our Blog to Blog Directories

So we were sitting around the (virtual) office the other day, thinking of ways to generate traffic to this site, when we couldn’t believe that we had forgotten about blog directories! Back when the blogosphere was first created, it was very hard to find people’s personal blogs. The good thing about that, was if you had an embarrassing livejournal twenty years ago, no one (probably) read it. The bad thing is that if you had great content, it was hard for people to find it. That is still true today, and directories and aggregators try to help with that.

To help blogs get found, directories popped up that would collect, categorize, and sometimes rate them, which made it easier to find interesting content. It also helped elevate good content, rewarding those writers who deserved it. But that was a long time ago, and I had no idea what the landscape looked like now.

Where else to start but Google? Typing in “the best blog directories” gave me these top two results, both of which looked promising: 20 Essential Blog Directories to Submit your Blog to 10 Blog Directories that will Propel your Website to the Next Level

Pretty cool, but these are really out of date, especially since they mention Technorati, which hasn’t collected and ranked blogs since 2014. A lot of the other links on those sites are also dead now. What a shame! But nevertheless, a good starting point.

Going through the list, I discovered that a lot of the directories required payment, or, even worse, a referral banner or button on the actual blog. I get it, everyone is looking for link juice, but we don’t want to populate our blog with a lot of buttons and banners, especially since we are a commercial site. I am also wary of dishing out money for a listing, when I have no idea how effective it will be. As a company, we decided to see how our blog does on the free directories first, before deciding to submit to a paid directory.

The List

From the two lists above, here is my impression of the directories and what I did. I have chosen not to include the dead links or discontinued sites to keep it short and sweet. I have also included the Domain Authority (at the time of publishing – abbreviated in the list as DA), which is a metric developed by Moz to rank how authoritative domains are. In short, a higher domain authority should mean that it is easier for the page to rank in search engines, and it also means backlinks from these domains to your content are worth more. In theory then, if a directory has a higher domain, a link to your blog from it should be worth more.

http://portal.eatonweb.com/ (DA: 58) – Describes itself as the oldest and biggest blog directory on the internet. Listings start at $34.99, and your blog will be human reviewed and scored on three metrics: strength, momentum, and overall. It sounds a little intimidating. When thinking about submitting I got nervous about the state of our blog content, almost like I forgot to do something. Given Gawker, Daily Kos, and Huffington Post are some of the big names in this blog directory, if we decide to pay for a listing, this one seems the strongest overall.
http://globeofblogs.com/ (DA: 65) – This is a free blog directory which one of the aforementioned lists said did not accept any commercial blogs (non-commercial only), but I did not find any such information on their site, so we submitted this blog for a listing. Let’s see!
http://www.lsblogs.com/ (DA: 55 ) – This is a pretty ugly site but it is built and maintained by one lone individual, at least thats what it says. It took me awhile to find where to submit your blog URL and I almost gave up before I found it. Since submissions are currently down, I will have to check back later.
http://www.ontoplist.com/ (DA: 73) – Looks good, free to sign up but requires a log in (as most of the sites do.) There are some connected social media and analysis tools as well, but we are currently awaiting approval so I will have to look at those later.
http://www.blogarama.com/ (DA: 78) – Has free and premium listings, although a free listing could take up to 90 days. This could be sped up with a backlink button though! Anyway, seems pretty decent although their categories could be broader.

And here for the other entries in the lists, which are still around but I chose not to submit to for the reasons stated:

blogged – Has now become an aggregator of aggregators. It looks like it just collects posts from sites such as Gawker, BoingBoing, and puts them all in one place. I did not see anywhere to submit the blog to this “directory”.
bloggapedia – has a German version, and the latest topical posts I saw there were quite old, about a year old to be exact. This did not give me confidence to go forward with them since we want our directories to be topical and updated, which this one does not seem to be.
spillbean – still up and running, but requires a fee or a backlink button / banner. Pass for now, since we are going for free directories that do not require buttons or banners. Maybe in the future if we pursue paid submissions.
theblogpress – It looks like it is now a blogging platform, and no longer a directory.
blogcatalog – is free, unless you are part of some specific industries. Unfortunately, Growth Labs falls into one of those categories. From browsing the front page of its blog aggregator, it seems to focus on personal blogs, so it might not be the best fit for commercial writing.
blogio – This is now an actual blog, not a blog directory. It seems the domain has switched hands and it is not the same thing as it once was. Nothing to submit to here.
bloglisting – I didn’t like this one. Maybe it was because I was tired of creating even more accounts. Maybe it was the video guidelines. Maybe it was the look of the site which put me off. But I chose not to submit to it either.
technorati – This used to be the number one blog directory, until they stopped and started working on other things, so we can’t list our blog there anymore. Domain authority of 100, by the way.
bloggingfusion – non-commercial sites only, so that excludes us. 🙁

Ping-o-matic

Next was Blogdigger (DA: 77). I really wanted to get listed on this site but I could not find out how. After doing some research, I found out about Ping-o-matic. Ping-o-matic is a service that your blog can ping every time it is updated with a new post. If you are running a WordPress blog, chances are good that your blog pings this service automatically. (You can change this under Settings -> Writing). If your CMS does not allow automatic pings on updates, you can go to the website and manually ask to ping it.

What Ping-o-matic does then is ping other services to let them know that your blog was updated. These services (such as Blogdigger) will then receive the ping and crawl your site, adding your blog and latest post to their list. Ping-o-matic gives you a handful of services it can ping for you, and you can choose which ones you want. Included in the list apart from Blogdigger, is Feedbruner, My Yahoo, and Google Blog Search. These are all services and search engines which try to index blogs and make them easier to find.

The benefit of this is that you do not have to register your blog on a lot of aggregators. Sweet! So since Hubspot does not ping search engines and aggregators like WordPress does, I manually pinged Blogdigger, Feedburner, and a few other ones off the list that I recognized. Feedburner, for example, is the service that Apple uses to manage its podcast feeds on iTunes.