Directories, social bookmarking, profile and comment links: do they still work?

As ranking tactics, no. Directory submission packages, social bookmarks, bulk profile links and blog comments stopped moving rankings years ago, and most of them are named in Google’s link spam policy. What survives is a small set of curated listings and real community activity, which are worth doing for reasons other than link equity.

This lesson takes each old method in turn: what it was, what Google says about it now, and whether any version of it is still worth your time.

The short answer in one table

Method	What Google’s pages say	Still worth doing?
Mass directory submissions	“Low-quality directory or bookmark site links” are listed as link spam	No
Curated niche directories and associations	Not named. Only low-quality directories are	Yes, a handful
Local citations	Not named	Yes, for local businesses
Social bookmarking	Bookmark site links are listed as link spam	No
Profile links in bulk	Covered by user-generated spam and automation	No
Blog comments	Comments should carry the ugc value, and such links “will generally not be followed”	Only as real conversation
Forum signatures	“Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature” are listed as link spam	No
Free subdomain blogs (Web 2.0s)	Low-value content made to manipulate linking signals is listed as link spam	No

The quoted wording comes from Google’s spam policies, last updated on 28 August 2026, and its documentation on qualifying outbound links, last updated in December 2025. The full list is in what counts as link spam.

Why these links stopped working

All of these methods share one feature: you place the link yourself. No editor decided your page deserved a citation. Search engines learned to discount exactly that.

There are two mechanisms. The first is the link attribute. Most platforms that accept user content mark outbound links as nofollow or ugc, and Google’s documentation says links marked this way “will generally not be followed”. Our lesson on link attributes explains the detail. The second is that Google’s systems ignore links they judge to be spam. Since these patterns are among the oldest and most recognisable on the web, they are the easiest to ignore.

The result is rarely a penalty. It is nothing at all: a report full of links that do no work.

Directory submissions

A package that submits your site to hundreds of general directories is the textbook case. The directories accept everything, nobody browses them, and the policy names them.

Curated directories are a different product. Industry directories, software review sites, chambers of commerce, trade associations and professional registers have real users and reject listings that do not qualify. Membership ranges from free to a few hundred dollars a year, practitioners report. Two questions sort a good directory from a bad one: would a customer use it, and does it turn anyone away?

For businesses with a physical location, local citations are worth building properly. These are listings of your name, address and phone number on maps, business directories and data aggregators. BrightLocal’s price list, checked in October 2026, charges $2.00 to $3.20 per manually built citation. Treat them as a local search and identity signal more than as ranking links. Services that build them are compared in our local citation services guide.

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking sites let users save and share links publicly. In the 2000s, SEOs submitted every new page to dozens of them. The sites that mattered have closed, changed or marked their links nofollow, and what remains are networks that exist mainly to host SEO submissions.

Google’s policy names “bookmark site links” next to low-quality directories. Lists of “500 social bookmarking sites” still circulate and packages are still sold. They produce a line in a report and no measurable effect.

Do not confuse this with real sharing. Posting your work where your audience is, on LinkedIn, in a newsletter or in a community, brings readers, and readers sometimes link. That is distribution, not bookmarking.

Profile links

A profile link is the website field on a user account. One profile on a platform you use is normal. The spam version registers accounts on thousands of forums and platforms only to fill in that field. The footprints are well known: a username that is a keyword, an empty profile and no posts.

Software does this at volume, which puts it under the policy’s wording on automated programs. Our page on automated links describes how that market works. On a site you care about, these links are ignored at best.

Blog comments and forum posts

Comment links were once followed, which is why comment spam exists. Today nearly every platform marks them nofollow or ugc. The policy also names “forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature” and gives an example of a signature stuffed with keyword anchors.

Paid forum posting still exists. In some markets it is sold as “crowd marketing”: posts placed by aged accounts, reported at $3 to $20 per post, though that figure is low confidence. Buyers use it to add variety to a link profile. No published data shows that it improves rankings.

Real participation is different and has gained value. Peec AI’s March 2026 analysis of 30 million citations states that Reddit and YouTube are the only domains in every AI engine’s top five cited sources, although its own published ChatGPT list is Wikipedia, Reddit, Forbes, TechRadar and LinkedIn. A helpful answer under your own name, with your affiliation disclosed, can shape how a brand is described in search and in AI answers. The link in it is close to irrelevant. See brand mentions and citations for why mentions matter.

Free subdomain blogs

“Web 2.0” links are articles on free blog platforms, written only to link to your site. The footprint is a brand-new subdomain with one to five posts that all link to one place. As ranking links their value is near zero, practitioners report. Some operators still use them as a second layer in tiered link building, pointing them at other links instead of at the main site.

Can they hurt you?

For most sites, a scattering of old directory and comment links is harmless. Every established site has some, and Google’s systems ignore them. You do not need to remove or disavow them.

The risk rises with volume and anchors. Thousands of profile or comment links with exact-match keyword anchors, pointed at a site you depend on, form the kind of pattern a human reviewer can act on. If you inherited a profile like that, the backlink audit lesson explains how to judge it.

What to do instead

If you are starting out, the useful version of this work takes an afternoon:

1. Claim your profiles on the platforms your customers use, with consistent business details.
2. List the business in the few directories and associations that people in your industry check.
3. For a local business, build the core citations once and audit them once a year.
4. Join one or two communities and answer questions as yourself.

Then spend the rest of your effort on links that involve someone else’s editorial decision.

Where to go next

Your first 100 links puts these foundations in order alongside the tactics that do move rankings. Terms such as citation, ugc and Web 2.0 are defined in the glossary.