What most of the blog directories that require a recip link are missing

[Meorazhar]

Dear blog directory owners. Ask yourself a question. Have you been an owner of a quality established blog, would you like to get listed in your own directory?

Why don’t you look at it from the point of view of a blog owner. Let’s pretend you are a webmaster who runs a truly quality blog, and is very cautious to whom he links to. Would you put a mainpage (or even sitewide) link to a new (or even established) blog directory? I am more and more inclined to think it’s not worth it.

It’s like when you have an established high-PR site and then someone comes to you and says, hey, give me a link from your main page. My site is new, you know, but when enough people link to me, it will have a good PR and I’ll send you good traffic. As we all know this rarely happens. Go over traffic trades / gallery requests search forum and see what linking partners the people with PR4 and above sites are looking for. You’ll be surprised. They all want to swap links with:
1. Quality
2. Theme related
3. high-PR
resources. Preferably if it’s a-b-c trade (I asked one link list owner if he could list me if I linked back from another PR2 page of mine, but he said “it would be too complicated”)

If you build a free site which has no traffic and no PR and put 12 recip links to link lists, it’s fair. You’re giving them content, they’re giving you traffic and hopefully PR. But when you already have an established resource, with quality traffic, bookmarkers and high PR, I don’t think it’s a good idea to give directories all at once (quality content, high PR and traffic) for virtually nothing in return. I’m listed in several of directories and the most of them (even established ones) send me as much as 5-10 hits a week.

Plus, it is not that good for my SEO to put a link to unrelated resource on my page. So basically I am HARMING myself!

As a result, all those new blog directories that require a recip link end up listing a bunch of crappy blogs/splogs the owners of which already have some 100 links to other crappy resources and do not care if there will be yet another link.

Surfers come to such directories, see what is listed there, quickly understand that it is mostly crap and move away. And we all wonder why directory traffic is so hard to convert.

If you want to run a quality directory, why not fill it with quality sites?