Let’s start with the alphabetical categorization. This method in my opinion makes useless one of the main advantages of directory software site under the enviroment category of my directory because at the time that category was PR6, enough said). In addition to that the alphabetical listings limit the total number of categories by definition which is good for directory owners but bad for submitters since it means that if a directory becomes popular listings will quickly move in page 2 or three and if they want to go back to page one they will have top engage in a bidding war. Also after a while the necessery bid to get a fresh listing in page one for a new site might be really high (it’s easier to add 5$ to your listing to move it to page one than spending 100$ to get your site listed there). In all honesty I will stay away from bid for position directories that use this kind of categorization for the same reason I staid away from tag clouds. No cocitation, or to be more exact bad cocitation, that from my experience can do more bad than good especially for extremely niche sites.

The ones that use categorization by subject are much less in numbers right now and it was one of them that started this craze, BigWebLinks that is owned by the owner of Alive Directory. These are much better in my opinion because they can offer at least some basic cocitation. Of course since they mostly have only top level categories the cocitation won’t be great either. The reason that I don’t believe that they are going to expand their categories structure is simple. The less categories the strongest the bidding wars. However, even if some people get in bidding wars at first I am not sure for how long they will participate until they say “who cares let it sink”. In addition to that I really doubt that they will attract the interest of SEO companies since they usually work with a set budget for each client and in addition to that they will have to spend time monitoring their client positions in various bidding directories and as everyone knows time is money. Generally I believe that these kind of bid for position directories will do better in the long term but I personally decided to wait a bit more before jumping on the bandwagon of buying listings (I definitely don’t plan on creating one).

Hi Mike, let’s start by getting straight to the point. What was the main reason that made you start the directory contest?

Dimitris, first off thank you for these great questions. Have been seeing your blog around for a while and am happy to add something to it.

The reason for the contest was and is to create the platform to let the search engines build the biggest and best directory of directories. No other url has been listed by as many different directories. Many tools will be developed around this contest. Different search engine marketers will use different criteria to find the directories they want to submit to. Some will use the link domain feature, some will add keywords to it. You name it, everything is right there and ready to be used. I have seen many directories of directories, and frankly, none of them has impressed me. Including my own.

A few people (including me) have expressed concerns that since backlinks are allowed this is just another SEO contest. What in your opinion differentiates it from other SEO contests.

I don´t believe that those links are that helpful. What matters most is how much the search engines like your directory, which depends on many more factors. If you have credibility in Google, you won´t need backlinks. Some of the directories in the top 3 pages don´t use any. You can do the research yourself. This contest is not perfect, but if you know what to look for, you will find the directories which more or less shot themselves out there, as well as the ones that Google just threw to the top, without the directory owners really doing anything. Those IMO are the directories worth submitting to and they are the ones that pass on credibility to every website listed.

What do you think is the main motive of the people participating, $money$ or the brand recognition?

The excitement, the fun, the competitive spirit. And of course the money. Also: the forerunners have experienced a huge increase in submissions.

I have watched the results for a while and analyzed the backlinks of a lot of the directories participating. The amount of backlinks that a lot of directory owners have pointed to their entries is amazing, 5000+ in a lot of cases. Do you think that this can hurt these directories in the long term and get them penalized since this a highly unnatural linking pattern.

Not unless you have no other backlinks into any part of the directory. No, I actually do believe that deeplinks like those are very, very helpful and will strengthen the domain name which those directories are hosted on. And also, the common keyword denominator is ¨directories¨. I don´t see penalties, I only see benefits, huge ones from whichever angle you want to look at it.

There has been quite a bit of discussion about the rules, have you disqualified any directories up to this point?

At this point and time I will no longer comment publically about who is in violation and who isn´t. I have gone back to the basics and specified the rules as being ¨treat the listing like any other¨. If you have a script that creates meta tags for every listing, more power to you, if your featured listings get featured on the homepage with the right anchor … more power to you. Just don´t do anything that other listings don´t get.

Do you believe that the results of the contest will be valuable for the average webmaster trying to decide which directories to use?

Yes, I do. And the more time goes by and the more Google settles in, the clearer the results will be. I´m sure that there will be a lot more talk about it regarding which way the results should be used for the best benefit. Like everyone watching, I am learning as well and it´s fun and very interesting to say the least!

Thank you for answering my questions Mike. If there is anything else that you would like to mention about the contest feel free to share it with us.

I want people to have fun. The directory business is stale and boring. It needs life and creativity. This is only the beginning, I´m planning to keep things alive and kicking and am already on the next page when it comes to taking things to the next level. Anyone who has any input, bring it. Thank you for the interview, hope that everyone reading this has gotten a little bit more of an insight on what is about to happen here.

Anyway I am mostly an observer for now, we will see what happens during the ending stages of the contest

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)

Other noteworthy changes include that two of the most heavily marketed directories Alive Directory and Aviva Directory are finally getting the PR that everyone was expecting (PR7).

I suppose it would better to let things settle a bit more before I post my thought about this PR update and how it will affect new and established directories (like it or not it does affect them).

I will try to answer that using an example from my main field of expertise. Personally, I am a health professional and in my field we use a lot of indices to classify people in categories. Let’s take for example the Body Mass Index (BMI) that a lot of people and health professionals use to assess the health risk of people as well as their weight status. There are a lot of people that use it without second thought and believe it’s a very useful tool and there are a lot of people that claim it’s useless because of it’s limitations. So is an index like that really useful? The simple answer is yes. It is useful as long as you understand it’s limitations simply because by understanding it’s limitations you can interpret correctly the results. Realise when you need to take them seriously and when to just disregard them and try a different method of assessment.

So what are the limitations of the Page Strength Tool especially in regards to directories?

Let’s take a look at all of the parameters that the tool takes into account.

Links pointing to full URL and Links pointing to domain:. Of course this is an important factor that I look at as well. However the results can easily be skewed if someone has a few sitewide backlinks from big sites like forums or even other directories. It is always wise to check the quality of at least the first 20-50 backlinks of a site (at least that’s what I do). I realise that this is almost impossible because how can you assess the quality of backlinks using a query or if you found a way the processing power needed to get the results would be too high.

Position at Google for first four words of title tag on target URL: Again a useful metric that I guess is meant to show if the site (or directory in this case) is “sandboxed” or carries a penalty. Possible problems that I see with this is that a site may not appear anywhere in the top10 if it uses a generic title. For example my directory is called Your Index, I realise that it’s not a competitive term per se but it is a term that appears in a lot of high profile websites that might outrank me and as a result I will not appear in the top results. The fact is that I appear in the results for the first results of my title which are “Your Index Directory :: Web” however for some reason the tool skips the first word and searches for “Index Directory Web Directory” (I have to check to see if there is a problem with my title or if it was just a glitch of the tool)

Age of Domain: No objections here. The only thing that I can see as a potential problem is that subdomains of older websites might get a bit of a boost.

Links from .Edu and .Gov domains: Again no real complaints here, but again it is a good idea to check the actual .edu and .gov backlinks (SEOmozz allows you to do that easily by clicking on the source)

Alexa Rank: We all know the limitations of Alexa rank and everyone (or almost everyone) knows that the results are really skewed when it comes to webmaster related websites. Also this metric gives a boost to subdomains, since Alexa rank just gives a metric for the whole domain.

Domain Name Visibility: I don’t really understand the usefulness of this metric but I may be missing something.

Internal link percent: Useless in this case because we are looking at homepages, not specific pages.

Del.icio.us Bookmarks: Not a bad idea of implementing that as one of the parameters. The obvious problems with directories is that it might benefit more directory portals where users might have bookmarked other parts of the site.

DMOZ: Nothing much to say here, I just don’t understand why they decided to use Yahoo’s results and not query DMOZ directly.

Wikipedia: Wikipedia links are really hard to get, (I am talking about directories) although I know of a directory that has done really well in this department. However, yes if you badly want to get them then yes there is an easy way to skew the results and the best part is that no one will accuse you of spamming (No I am not talking about profiles, although someone might use that too)

Pagerank: The main problem that I see is that the last couple of updates have been a bit messed up (not updating PR for older sites) so the results might be a bit skewed until the next normal PR update.

So yes it has it’s limitations and another limitation when looking at directories is that it doesn’t take into account the number of indexed pages which is really important for directories. However it is still a useful tool and the list compiled by Aviva Directory is a useful guide as long as everyone realises that there are limitations and what are those limitations.