In this case study, we will discuss how we found and quality-checked over 50 directory links for an online marketing client.
This amount sounds steep, and I wouldn’t suggest this for a worldwide website. But these links are mandatory if you want to rank a website on Dutch Google(and other countries).
All the high-ranking websites on google.NL have a large many of these links (sometimes up to 80%). This goes against the worldwide view that you need contextual backlinks to rank, but that is how Google ranks Dutch and other non-USA countries’ websites.
You can not rank country-specific websites with only directory links, but that Google likes these links give you an advantage and can make link-building a lot cheaper.
How To Discover These Links
To discover the quality directories, we will use the link intersect tool. We will compare the backlinks of the 3 to 4 highest ranking websites with your backlinks.
We prefer to do this with a link intersect because you get the directories that help your competitors rank.
We will sort out the most niche-relevant ones and check if they are indexed. After this, we can sort them on DR/DA. Because of the simplicity of these pages, it is not necessary to dig deep into the directory.
This is the result of a link intersect with some random tire companies.
Now we can check if these directories are niche-relevant. And if the spam score isn’t too high.
Now you want to check if the URLs are indexed. If Google didn’t find the website, you do not get any juice from that directory. So type this in Google;
site:subdomain.directylink.nl
And check if the domain is indexed. If it is, you can add them to your list. You can later sort these links on DR/DA or the number of backlinks a specific page has.
Extra Advice
- Pick directories with the most page-specific backlinks instead of the highest DR.
- Pick directories with not many listings. Less outgoing links are more link juice for you.
- If you have to pick one with many listings, try to get as high as possible on the page. Use “view page source” for this.
- Use these country-specific directory links to upgrade the amount of “country backlinks” so you can add more .com contextual links that are cheaper than the Dutch ones.