I remember the days when I first visited Europe and the UK in 1997 and we all searched for places, restaurants, hotels, and businesses in a yellow pages book known as the local directory. Now the days of that manual work are gone and online all information about the business is available in local business directories.

In most discussion forums or blogs you will find one answer to the free online directory listing NO. You will find a lot of articles on the web which say free directory listing is dangerous for search engine optimization( SEO) strategy. Is it really so? Let’s do some digging into this concept or myth.

First, we must understand what is a directory? An online directory is a collection of websites or businesses which are categorised into various categories as per the editor of the directory. Common Directories can be divided into two categories General and business directories. General directories are collections of websites where you can find titles, descriptions, URLs and emails etc. Whereas businesses directory as also named as yellow pages contain complete business details including NAP, CEO name, Turnover, number of employed and many more. Online you can find both general and business directories for free. Local Business directories listings are also known as local citations as in both cases you need to fill the NAP.

The dangerous part in directory listing which can harm your website is getting your site listed in free, low domain authority, network managed or spammy website directories. However, getting listed in niche-specific directories can be useful. For example, if you own a restaurant in London, get listed in the “London Restaurant Directory”. This listing will help you.

So far as local and business directories are concerned there seems to be no harm. They are all free. That does not mean they are spammy business listing sites like Google My Business, Yelp UK, Bing Places, FourSquare, The Sun Directory, FreeIndex, Cylex Business, Business Network, Fyple, Brownbook, 192.com or Megri Web Directory. You can trust these business listing sites and help you with inbound links, local SEO, branding and improving visibility.

Therefore the myth of website directory listing or submission must be understood before believing that all directory submissions or listings are spam.

Therefore we recommend you avail of our local business directory listing services to get listings in the United Kingdom business directory. These services are also known as local citation services.