How many Directory Web sites still active?

[nopain810]

After a long period, near about 6 years I want to know what kind of Web Directories still active?  Is that kind of Directory links help SERP for gaining Ranks?

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Haha thanks.  I thought all the CAPITALS and italics made me sound a bit crazy so thanks for the vote of confidence my SEO Moz brother.  I hope the OP doesn't waste his precious money on dodgy directories. 

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I have tried to upvote your response ten times, unfortunately works only once. Spot on.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

No way.  Avoid at all costs.  Directories are completely useless for linkbuilding in 2018.

DIRECTORIES DO NOT WORK IN 2018 - you will harm your site. Directories are not the same as local citations.  Citation building is very important for a new site and you can do this manually with Moz Local or Get it done for yuou by Whitespark.  They are pretty cheap and do a decent job.

And I'm not just being a nay-sayer I've actually tested about 30 out all pointing to homepage and deep pages inside my site and it harmed them or didn't make any difference at all.  They were mostly paid and all used to have a good reputation but it's a bad strategy.  The only one that's remotely decent is called Joe Ant - that's showing up as a green light but it's referring no traffic at all so google's likely just ignoring it.

And in the future as things move on - more and more directories are going to get de-indexed and having links from de-indexed sites hurts your rankings.  I did my little test in January this year so it's bang up to date and I spent £1,350 on paid directories ranging from £5 a pop to £20 to some that were £250 and they were national and local and none of them worked. I ended up having to disavow them.

There are much better ways to get your first few links: Linkbuilding to stand the test of time and how to get your first 50 links

Also there's a great little tool called SEO Profiler - it's super cheap and has lots of bugs and it's pretty crappy compared with Moz or the big boys but I use it for three things: 1) top three position benchmarking, 2) it has a great schema builder that creates J-son and schema for you by magic and 3) it has this exhaustive list of 'starter backlinks' that is a great place to look for link opportunities that are nice and easy if you've got a new site or are starting out.