Are paid directory listings worth it?

Short answer: a paid listing is worth it when you are buying placement, and worth nothing when you are buying a link. Those look like the same purchase and they are not.

Of the 192 directories in our catalogue, 85 are freemium and 18 are paid only. So 103 of them want money somewhere. That is more than half, which is why this question comes up.

What you are actually buying

A directory has exactly three things it can sell you, and most sell one.

Attention. A pinned row, a homepage slot, a newsletter mention. This is a real product. You can measure it: clicks arrive or they do not, and you can compare the cost against what the same money buys in ads. If the directory has traffic, this is a fair trade.

A link that passes ranking credit. This is the one to be careful about. Google's link spam policy is explicit that a paid link passing PageRank is a link scheme, and the penalty lands on the whole domain, not the one link. A directory selling you a followed link is either marking it rel="sponsored" anyway, in which case you are not getting what you think, or it is exposing both of you. Neither is worth paying for.

Speed. Some paid tiers are just queue jumping. Whether that is worth anything depends on how long the free queue is, and usually it is not long.

The test

Before paying, ask the directory one question: is the link on a paid listing followed or sponsored?

• If they say sponsored, good, they are being honest. Now judge the purchase purely on traffic.
• If they say followed, they are selling PageRank. Assume the listing is worth what the traffic is worth and treat the link as zero, because that is what it will be worth after the next update.
• If they cannot answer, that tells you how much thought went into the rest of it.

We answer it on ourselves, for the record: our featured placement is rel="sponsored". It buys the row, the badge and the traffic. It does not buy ranking credit, it does not buy a write-up, and it does not buy a better one.

When the free tier wins

Most of the time, honestly.

The free listing on a good directory gets you the same page, the same followed link and the same crawl as the paid one on most of these sites. What you give up is position, and position only matters on a directory with enough traffic for position to be worth something. On a DR 40 directory nobody browses, the paid tier is a donation.

Rule of thumb: pay when the directory is somewhere your buyers already spend time. Do not pay for a link.

Where the money is better spent

If your budget is one payment rather than a subscription, the ranking of options is roughly:

1. A launch on a place with real traffic. Product Hunt and Hacker News are free and both outperform any paid directory tier we have seen.
2. The free rows on the top 20 directories. An afternoon of work, no money, and it is where most of the ranking credit in the whole list sits.
3. Then a paid placement, on the one or two directories where your buyers actually are.

The honest summary

Paid listings are not a scam and they are not a growth strategy. They are advertising. Price them like advertising, measure them like advertising, and ignore any pitch that leads with domain authority instead of traffic.

Listing here is free, on every tier, for any number of apps. The paid thing is a placement and we say what it is.