Directories Blog

Let’s face it, most people submit to directories just for the potential SEO benefits, so I thought I should make a post about my opinions on the use keyword rich titles. Of course this post also covers some of my opinions about the benefits or disadvantages of generally using keyword rich anchor text for links.

Most of the people when submitting to directories tend to use keyword rich titles (even if the directory guidelines say that it isn’t acceptable) thinking that it will help them with the SERPs. Aaron Wall has recently written a post about Google depreciating Anchor Text and I agree with him for the most part. However I have a slightly different theory about it. Google isn’t depreciating anchor text, it’s depreciating anchor text when it looks unnatural. Let me explain this theory of mine a bit more. All of us at some point we have visited one of the thousands of arcade or Myspace resources sites etc. These kind of sites tend to link exchange a lot and every owner wants to get a keyword rich title for his link. The result is a block of links that looks like:
Flash Games
Free Flash Games
Cool Flash Games
Flash Games
Addicting Flash Games
etc
Now tell me does this look natural to you? Obviously not and I suppose Search bots are clever enough now days to filter these results and devalue these links, so in this case anchor text might even hurt you (just my personal opinion).
On the other hand think of blog post that goes bla bla bla this is my favorite sites for playing Flash Games
Much better and I believe that in this case the anchor text really adds value to the link in this case.

Now how does this affects directory submissions? In some rare cases, submitters actually submit their sites at the right categories (yes I know it’s shocking but it’s true). So for example let’s assume that there is a category Games/Online Games/Flash Games
If everyone submitted their sites using a keyword rich title then we would have the same effect as the first example and a keyword stuffed page full of links with the same or similar anchor text. Doesn’t look good to me. I believe that it’s obvious that I believe that using the actual name of the website might be more beneficial.

Of course there is a third choice as well. The Title, Keyword Keyword one. This in terms of SEO benefits might even the best (don’t take my word for it). Plus it has an advantage in terms of SEM. Let me explain this with another non directory example.
Let’s say again that I am visiting the Game site at the first example and I see all these links with the same anchor text (just a regular visitor not a search bot). I obviously won’t visit all or maybe none of those links. Let’s now say that one of them has asked the owner of the site to use a title like Brandablenamehere: Flash Games. I am still not going to visit BUT I have seen the name of the site and that is related with flash games. Big deal you might say, and you are wrong (or might be wrong who really knows :)). The reason that this is important is that if I see the name again the next day, and then again at another site after two days etc it’s becoming a brand in my mind (obviously the flash games niche isn’t the best for this example), and brand recognition is really important in Marketing.

So what would I do, I would definitely include the sites name in the title and if I am allowed to do so by the directory’s guidelines I would also add two to three descriptive keywords and vary these keywords between directories that allow keyword rich titles. Would I go just for the Keyword Keyword title? Not really, but I suppose most people would disagree with me.

Disclaimer: The contents of this post are just the personal opinion of the author (me :)) and should not be construed as medical advice or substitute for professional care. If you are having symptoms of a heart attack each time the SERPs change please ignore the above post and consult your family SEO :).

Seach and Go is probably not a really well know directory, I rarely (if ever) see someone mentioning it in webmasters forums. However, I must say that it is one of the directories that I believe will become really big in the years to come (I am not affiliated with the owners I don’t even know who they are). The reason for this is that they have done a few things that I believe will pay off in the future.
First of all the site is packed with unique content, what does that mean? Simply two things, food for the search engines that if they haven’t yet I am sure that they will start delivering traffic pretty soon and a magnet for links.
Another really nice touch is their GeoID tracker that is similar to the one from digitalpoint. The reason that this is going to help is quite obvious, Yahoo already reports about 50k links to that part of the site and I am sure that the links will continue growing with a steady pace.
Other than that the directory has a nice design, although not directory like but I guess this is done on purpose since it is more of a portal than a web directory. Nonetheless I believe they could improve the navigation within the directory part of the site.
Pricing: A regular listing costs $23.99 per year which is fair in my opinion but the Express costs $29 per month which means $348 per year (quite expensive for me).

Anyway, kudos to the people at Search and Go that have built and are still building a really nice directory.

I was thinking about what kind of links a directory owner should try to get. My view of the topic is probably not the most popular among directory owners or webmasters, but here it goes.
Most directory owners believe that they should get as many webmaster related links as possible because they are more relevant. In my opinion this is wrong, the reason is simple, a directory has two dinstinct different target audiences.

1. Directory submitters which are mainly webmasters
2. Casual Browsers

The first category is important because they are the ones that will submit their sites and provide the directory with the necessery content. They are also the ones that will purchase listings if you offer a paid submission option. However they are just a small part of what should be our overall target audience. The casual browsers are the ones that really matter. If you want to build a directory that will last in time I believe that first and foremost  this is the group that you should try and target and if you manage to achieve that, then webmasters will follow, simply because you will be in a position to send traffic to their sites.

Let’s take a look at the relevancy part of my theory. In my directory I currently have about 500 categories that I am planning to expand as submissions come in. Out of those about 100 are Art related, 40 Business related etc. Only 25 of them are Internet related and not all of these categories are about webmasters. What does that mean? The way I see it it means that most of the content at my directory isn’t webmasters related and as far as I can guess the search engines judge relevancy based on content, that makes you think how relevant are webmaster related link after all.

Of course, I am not saying that webmaster related links are useless (they send the paying traffic after all) but that a link building strategy targetting a variety of links might be a better choice.

Directory submission is a rather tedious job. However, although some people may not consider it important my personal opinion is that it can really help, especially for sites that natural backlinks are hard to get.
There are several tools that can help make the whole process faster.
Here are a few of them that I am aware of:

Informenter: Informenter is a form filling extension for firefox. This is the tool that I personally use the most for my directory submisssions.

Roboform: Probably the most well know and ost widely used form filling tool. If configured right and it can be extremely usefull for directory submissions but I avoid using it because it annoys me. Not that it is a bad software, actually it is really good but not for my taste.

Web Directory Form Filler: Haven’t used it but the demo looks really nice, a bit pricey but it looks like it is worth it.

Directory Expert: A tool that I have heard really good things about. I will probably give it a try and post a review.

If you know of any other tools feel free to comment and add to the list.

This is something that I have been thinking for quite some time. Up until now users at my directory could choose the order that the links were displayed (by date, by popularity, alphabetical, descending ascending). Of course that meant that search bots could do the same. So the result would be that search engines would see a number of identical pages with rearranged content which in the future might have lead in duplicate content penalties. Today after some thinking I decided to remove that option. I realise that I will lose a large number of indexed pages but I believe it’s better to have fewer and properly indexed pages that a lot of them and supplemental.
Another thing that a lot of directory owners sometimes forget to do and can also lead to duplicate content penalties is to disallow search bots from pages that are all the same, for example the submit link pages or the upgrade listings pages.

The owner of Aviva Directory recently posted an interesting list of directories classified according to their Page Strength as calculated with SEOmoz’s page strength tool. I have to admit that the tool is pretty cool and the results interesting. However, the real question is: Is this list useful? or as a more general question Is the page strength as an index useful?

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.

I just realised today that I haven’t submitted this blog to any directory, not even my own . This is mainly because I was never too concerned about traffic or rankings. My aim with this blog was to use it as personal training tool in my directory adventure, a place where I would be able to keep notes about what I have learned, what I have noticed etc. However, getting some activity isn’t bad, a couple of comments here and there, a bit of a discussion etc will help me keep this blog alive and possibly learn a couple of things more. So why did I use the title “Missing the Obvious”? Isn’t it obvious already? my main target audience is about 1000 people that are running directories, that I can actually force them to visit this site (even if it is just for a review) by submitting it to their directories. Some of them might stick around and get that kind of activity that I was talking about.

Moral of the story, concentrate on the obvious sources of traffic for your sites, they are easier to get and generally convert better for commercial sites.

Today I am going to do a mini review of Human Ranked Directory Project. The main characteristic of this relatively new directory is that each site listed is assigned a rank, in other words it is rated by the administrators on a scale from one to ten. This isn’t an original idea since sites like JoeAnt have been doing that for quite some time however it’s not something common in the directory world. IMHO this could be used as a great viral linking tool, for example in their acceptance emails they could add a line saying Congratulation, bla bla bla Your site has been given a rating of x, feel free to display this button showing your rating at your site {code}. Of course the button will be linking back to the directory .

The design of the directory is simple but effective. Two things that caught my eye are:
1. They have decided to include the latest links at the front page (about 50 of them). At first I was surprised by this, but later I realised that the links don’t point at the sites but at the categories that the sites are listed, which in my opinion creates a great internal linking structure.

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.

The search engine saturation is good with about 2300 indexed pages by Google. The problem is that Google considers most of these pages similar. The reason is quite obvious, they have used the same meta description for all the pages of the directory. This is a mistake that even large directories like Skaffe seem to have made.

Let’s not forget our friends the PR obsessed. Human Ranked Directory is a PR4 directory, however the inner categories haven’t gotten any PR yet. I don’t know the reason for this but it’s probably because the directory is still new.

Conclusion: Do I recommend it? Yes I do, it’s free and the owners seem to have spend quite some time developing it. I don’t know if it a completely homemade script or a customised commercial directory script but it certainly isn’t the average cookie cutter directory and best of all it accepts free submissions.

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.

It is frustrating to see all the crap MFA sites that get submitted to directories, however it is even worst when you receive sites that are listable but the category, title, description and keywords are all wrong because the submitter didn’t bother to read the Guidelines. I can understand the motives of people trying to get backlinks for their MFA sites but I can’t understand why people that have listable sites don’t add a proper title and description, I guess they don’t care enough to read the guidelines. I did a bit of an experiment where I submitted one of my not so quality sites to about 250 directories, for this site I would be happy with a 30-40% acceptance rate. However I used a proper title and description and I managed to get about 80% acceptance rate.

Now here are a few common mistakes when adding a title for a directory submission taken from examples in my current review Que (Things that you shouldn’t do)

Here is an example of a site trying to target multiple keywords in the title and thinks that I might actually approve it (specific keywords were removed)
Service 1 Location 1, Service 2, Service 3, Service 4, Service 5, Location 2
They don’t even mention the title of the site or even try to spam me with just one keyword they are going after at least five keywords and guess what, they have just lost a link and I guess if this is their standard practice many more in other directories (the site is not bad btw)

Here is an example of what I call an advert title:
Submit Your URL Here
What does that tell you as a title, great huh? and no it’s not the domain or the name of the site that is obviously a directory (tragic) and for Christ’s shake it’s not a term with an overture or something.

Of course there are always the separated multiple keyword titles like keyword 1 / keyword 2 / keyword 3 / Site name(the site name is optional :))
Yes those are great, why? because I don’t even have to visit the site to reject it, thanks for saving my time.

Another great practice is the “Category Title” where they submit for example in the web design category and the use as a title for their site “Web Design“. Imagine having a directory page with 50 sites titled web design you may get some decent rankings for the term unless SEs penalize you for keyword stuffing.

To be continued…… (too many mojitos to go on now)