This is my first review of a niche web directy and what better place to start than a directory of directories. The directory that I am going to review is Koopy.
First impressions are really positive, nice unique, short, memorable name and really nice, simple but effective design.
Now let me take out my checklist.
Search Engine Saturation: Koopy has 431 pages indexed by Google (at the time of this review) which is not much compared with other directories but lets not forget that Koopy is a niche directory with only four top level categories (and no details pages for the listings). So I guess search engine saturation is very good.
Link Popularity: According to Yahoo, koopy has about 12.500 backlinks. Also if you look at the backlinks they are mostly relevant (at least the first ones) so it seems that the owner has done a pretty good link campaign. (Check number 7 
, in case you get different results because of geotargetting it’s directories blog)
Category Structure: As you can see it is a very niche directory and there are very few different categories structures that could have been used. My main objection is that using as top categories free and paid and reciprocal might cause a few problems (I am saying that from my own experience since I did the same mistake at my directory). The main problem would be that directories turn from free to paid and vice versa all the time so it will be difficult to keep the listings accurate and up to date. IMHO it would be better if the top categories where General and Niche.
PR: For the PR obsessed Koopy has a pagerank of 2, but the top level categories all are PR4. This is probably due to the fact that Google didn’t update sites that had PR before the 4/4 update/
Traffic : Obviously I don’t know the traffic stats but I was going to take a look at my logs to see how much traffic it sends to my directory but I just realised that it isn’t listed. I guess I forgot to submit it. The Alexa rank is 218,623, not great but not bad either for such a niche directory.
Pricing: Koopy is currently free but offers sponsored listings for 24.95$. It doesn’t mention if it is a recurring fee so I assume it is a one off payment. The price is really reasonable, especially if you consider the fact that it has very limited real estate to sell featured links because of the very low number of categories.
Conclusion: Koopy as a niche directory does a pretty good job, especially in a very limited niche where there are some really big established directories like ISEDB and Search Engine Colossus. It’s a nice looking directory and you just can’t beat the price.
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