In the online marketing world, and with SEO in particular, there’s a lot of accepted wisdom – ideas which people have picked up but often are untested.
One thing I’m passionate about is challenging accepted wisdom and establishing the truth. This allows us to focus efforts on tactics with maximum effectiveness for our clients, and also satisfies my insatiable intellectual curiosity 
As a result, I am constantly running experiments on various sites (with the owners informed consent of course!).
A few months ago I asked: do free directories still work? With SEO, I always think back to the value to the user, which is how Google thinks. Given many free directories are of low value and the barrier to entry for creating a free directory and submitting a site to a directory is low, I had wondered if Google had completely discounted them and everyone was wasting their time submitting to them.
To test this theory, I worked with a leading shopping cart comparison site. The site had no link building program during the test period, so the results are clean. I had discovered a desirable keyword not being targetted by this site – the site wasn’t ranking for it. I modified the homepage title tag to incorporate this phrase, and after a few weeks to settle in was ranking steadily at 15.
I then submitted the site to about 300 free directories, using the phrase and minor variants of it as anchor text. Not wanting to look too spammy, these submissions happened over about 2 months.
So what was the result?
Turns out this is one for accepted wisdom – free directory submissions do work. On completion of the submission, after some fluctuations, the ranking settled at spot 5 and has been steady for a few weeks. I also saw an increase in ranking for some long tail terms, leading me to believe the overall page rank of the site increased.
I do still believe that at some point in the future, Google is likely to discount free directories – this is pure speculation and I have no data or inside information to support that. The site is also ranked at spot 5 in Google Caffeine, suggesting any discounting of free directories is still a long way off. Until then, First Rate will continue to recommend this tactic to our clients.