Which directories deliver traffic to you?

We submitted to a great number of directories and are in the open directory. We have yet not submitted to Yahoo. We also paid for 2 themed directories.

It turns out the two themed directories deliver a fair amount of traffic. Even so they rank far behind Google, Yahoo, and, MSN. The other directories in total hardly deliver traffic.

Which directories deliver traffic to you?

I don't really get any traffic from directories. I get the occasional visitor from shop-browsing.co.uk and the odd Irish directory, but most of my traffic comes from google and yahoo.

Same here. Google, Yahoo then MSN. I only use the directories for the PR links to help with the ranking for the search engines and really count on them for traffic.

You will likely find this to be true with just about everyone: Directories are good BLs, but do not really deliver traffic. Except possibly for Yahoo, why would anyone pay to be in a directory? I am in a lot of free directories, but do not see the value for paying for an inclusion.

I have had no DMOZ refers in 8 months and about 10 Yahoo in three months though by nature of my subject my sites are not big traffic generators (culture and history).

I just calculated our traffic from the last 3 and 1/2 months.

From various searches

Google 42%
Yahoo 22%
MSN 7%
AOL 2.4%
Some themed directories 1.8%
Ask less than 1%
Themed sites that refer in about 5%

Everything else - with about 370 other sources.

The only directories that deliver traffic have a tight theme connected to our topic.

Dave

If you have a UK site always submit to the Splut directory. The links are not clean and do not pass PR but for a directory you can receive a fair bit of traffic.

We get around 150 hits from Yahoo a month, around 10 from DMOZ and 30% of our traffic comes from a themed directory.

ajdee

I run a Directory...

It direct niche traffic to people who sign up.

I have sent one site 734 unquie visitors since march...

I personally think that if you are listed on a directory that is the same your theme as your site and what you offer is attachive then your get visitors...

just imo ....

Two themed directories each drive about 1% of our search traffic to us. We have had conversions from them and are very pleased with being within them and it would be worthwhile to pay for them . Each delivers as much traffic as ask itself. We get miniscule traffic from general directories. Google delivers about 1/2 of all of our search traffic(traffic that doesn't come to us direct)(we have high rankings in google) Yahoo delivers about 20-30% (we are ranked #1 for one key phrase). Themed back links deliver significant traffic that does convert.It seems from reading through this thread and others like it that traffic is different for different types of sites.

We get a lot out of reading through these threads to see what works for different types of sites.

We are more interested in building traffic and conversions than straight SERPs though both interact to help our business.

Dave

We get a little traffic from our directory listing in Yahoo, but mainly I join them for the bl and pr boost. I think the Yahoo directory could be a great source of traffic, it just depends on what industry you are in. If you want to get listed on Yahoo, I would try the free submit first. $299 per year is a mite much.

The free option is only available to non-commercial websites...so businesses have no other option if they want to be included in the directory.

We are listed in the Yahoo dir and we don't get anything from them.