The first directory contest (at least to my knowledge) has started. The official site of the contest can be found here. According to the site, the aim of the contest is to identify the directories that provide the most benefit in terms of SEO to the submitters. The rules are simple, directory owners should simply include the directory contest site in their index as a regular or featured link and then on February 6th 2007, 10 AM P.S.T. Mike, the starter of the contest will search Google for directorycontest.com/ and the directory that comes on top of the results will win. There are quite a few good prizes, both monetary and non monetary but you can read more about that at the directory contest site.
Some things I don’t like about this contest:
First of all directory owners are allowed to point links at the page that the site is listed. I would prefer it if that wasn’t allowed. Personally when the contest is over, out of curiosity, I will analyze the backlinks to the listing page of all the top directories to see which ones actually can rank without any additional external links.
The other thing is is that the results might be a bit skewed for a simple reason. From my experience directories can get quite a bit of traffic for specific queries. This is of course due to the fact that some categories of a directory (for one reason or another) rank good, while others don’t. It would be better in my opinion to have at least five sites submitted in each directory at different categories and then rank the directories based on the average position for five different search queries. This would also make it harder for people to try and manipulate the results by getting external backlinks.
Now, the real question is will I enter the competition? I just did, however, I have decided that I will not do any offsite optimization, I will not even link to the listing page of my entry from this post.
Good luck to everyone (you are going to need it to beat me lol)
Related Posts
- Directory Contest Update The directory contest is getting hot with a lot of participants. Currently (at least at the datacenter I am hitting)
- Interview with Mike Dammann about the Directory Contest I currently had the pleasure of doing a mini interview with Mike Dammann the man behind the recent Directory Contest
November 30th, 2006 at 9:39 am
You’ve got a point with not deep linking to the directory link in the directory. It would be nice if botw, joeant or alivedirectory would enter this contest to see if they would have better search engine rankings than smaller nice web directories. Good luck with your entry in this contest.