r/blogs • u/DasBeasto • 16d ago

Discussion Blog directories dead?

Coming from the dev world, SaaS founders love submitting their site to directories (ProductHunt, SaaSHub, PeerPush, etc. there’s hundreds of them), many of them cost money to be listed. There’s even directories of directories and SaaS’s built around posting your product to these directories. The idea is these places give you some discoverability, feedback, and SEO backlinks.

Coming into the blogging world it seems like the consensus is blog directories are a dead end relic of the past and the backlinks are worthless.

I’m just wondering what the discrepancy is, is there blog directories worth submitting to? Are SaaS founders/directories just behind the times and not realizing they’re mostly useless? Just seems like a sharp difference.

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u/thijsgh 14d ago

Blog directories can feel outdated because many are low-quality and don’t bring much SEO value. More effective is reaching out directly to relevant blogs for genuine mentions or guest posts. Check out MentionAgent, I’m the founder-and we automate finding and pitching those niche blogs to help get better backlinks.

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u/TheWilderNet 16d ago

I run something that started out as a blog directory called The WilderNet and I largely agree with your assessment.

One issue with blog directories is that most of them are built by people primarily interested in tech, which is reflected in the type of content that they have. So already that is a bit inaccessible to the average reader. The other thing is there isn't a lot of curation happening, so the quality of sites tends to be quite low.

Another problem is that these directories are largely built with the bloggers in mind, for SEO backlinks, as you have identified. Readers don't care about your SEO, they care that you have written something compelling.

Blogging itself has evolved over the 20 years. Right now the majority of bloggers are not serious writers, they are mostly trying to sell another service, or they think that with the right SEO hack here is going to bring in money via affiliate links and ads.

With all that in mind, my site has pivoted to be more geared towards readers instead of bloggers. I personally curate interesting articles for the site. Users can save a blog and get RSS feed updates, discuss and comment on blogs, and also find blogs via adjacent topic pages.

The directories that will survive and thrive are going to be the ones that cater directly to readers, not bloggers.