Creating the category structure for a directory is one of the most important factors that will determine whether a directory will be profitable or not. In my directory career I have built only one category structure (I own two directories but I bought the first one) and I must say I didn’t do a great job. However watching the submissions coming in made me realize my mistakes. For example when I started creating my categories I started with the category of arts and really paid a lot of attention to make it complete but not too deep and by the time I reached shopping I was bored. BIG BIG mistake, very few people will submit a paid listing in the Arts category or subcategories, the categories that will bring paid submissions are Business, Shopping, and Internet. These are the categories that need the most attention and a lot of thought.
Let’s look at some examples of categories structures and try to find the reasoning the pros and cons of them.
Let’s start with wowdirectory, it has thousands of categories if you combine the regular with the regional categories and a lot of cross-linking of categories. Is this good, in my opinion yes because the listings will not be crammed all in the top categories and the sites submitted will be listed along with a very closely related sites. However, by creating so deep categories they made it hard for the PR to pass so deep so they might be loosing submissions because webmasters will not pay to get listed in a PR1 or PR2 category. In addition to that there is always the danger that some of the categories will not even be cached (especially with all the latest Google problems) and therefore lose submissions once more from people that check if the category page is cached. However I doubt that is the case with Wowdirectory since it is very well indexed (I believe the cross-linked categories helped a lot). Finally one last problem that I see is that especially at the beginning there will be a lot of empty categories, this might be a problem because these categories could easily fall in the supplemental hell.
Now let’s look at a completely different approach. DirectoryMarker is not as well known as wowdirectory but is a successful web directory. Notice the number of categories displayed, just 201. Now what is the benefit of that? You can be sure that with a few good backlinks it will get crawled completely and that the PR will pass quite easily even in the most deep categories. Of course here are also helpful the alphabetical categories that provide a very good inner link scheme structure. However the bad thing is that some people may be turned off by the fact that will be listed side by side with not completely relevant sites.
So what is the best way to build your category structure. In my opinion the best way would be to create a category structure with about 400-500 categories. A complete but not so extensive category list and then expand it as the directory grows. This might also help with SEO because according to my observations (keep in mind I am no SEO guru) Google and the other search engines like sites that grow at a steady pace.
Now how about buying a category structure or copying one (let’s say DMOZ). To be honest I don’t think that this is such a good idea, I realize that there are very few things that you can do differently but when creating a category structure but even these small things can help a lot. For example you can add custom meta tags at every category (if the script allows it). Why is this important? Let’s take a look at an example again. Check this Google Query, you see that Google only list only two results from Skaffe.com one of the most well know directories (homepage and the blog). Let’s now see why this happens Google Query. Aha, all the pages have the same description “Searchable human edited international directory with family safe viewing filtered for spam and adult content.” so Google thinks that they are all similar(not supplemental, just too similar for Google). This of course doesn’t help SEO a lot and I would believe that search engine rankings aren’t as high as they could potentially be. So how can this affect the directory? Worst rankings=>Lower Traffic=> Lower number of clicks at the listings and probably lower number of submissions. Finally if you can come up with a unique category structure you have a lot more chances to be successful, Gimpsy: I rest my case.
So those are a couple of things that I believe every directory owner should keep in mind when starting a directory or changing his category structure.
Disclaimer: Keep in mind that I am still in the learning process and I am not a native English Speaker (don’t you dare make fun of my English)
PS: If any of the directory owners want me to remove their sites from the article I will be happy to use different directories as examples.
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July 29th, 2006 at 4:15 am
[...] 2. The not commercial categories and the categories that in most directories don’t receive a lot of submissions, like Art have very few subcategories while the commercial Categories like Business have a far more extensive subcategory structure. This is something that I generally agree with and I have talked about it previously in my category structure post. However I think in this case they have taken it a bit to the extreme. [...]