Directories Blog

This isn’t an actual post but more like a question. Has anyone figured out why bloggers don’t submit to general directories? and when I say bloggers I mean genuine bloggers not SEO bloggers or companies that have attached a blog to their company’s site. They obviously submit to blog directories and are even happy to give a reciprocal but do not submit to general directories. I have tried promoting my directories to blog related forums but with no luck whatsoever. I would expect with all the problogging craze that I would see more blog submissions but no, I find it really strange and to be honest I don’t have an answer why this might be happening.

Today I am going to take a look at the V7N Directory which is part of the V7 Network which also owns and operates two more directories, Seven Seek and Bluefind, so to say the least they have quite some experience on creating, promoting and running a directory.
Let’s start from the obvious, the looks. Overall I find the design pleasing and nice in the eyes, however I don’t understand why they chose to have different colors for the categories, it looks good at first but when you are browsing the directory after a while it becomes tiring for the eyes, at least for me. Another issue would be that some people might find it hard to find how to suggest a site, I guess they have realised that and that’s why they created the how to submit page (notice the screenshot), the only problem is that I can’t find it linked from anywhere on the main site.

A thing that is open for discussion that they decided to use a subdomain of an already established site to create this directory. Generally I am against directories as part of a site. Not because it will affect the value of the listings but because it doesn’t help the directory to get brand recognition that as I have said before is probably the number one factor that will determine whether a directory will become successful or not. Nonetheless, in this case I think it was a good choice to use a subdomain. After all, V7 Network already own two standalone directories. Why do I believe it was a good decision you may ask. The answer is simple, although I don’t know what are the intentions and goals of John Scott for this directory I doubt that he wanted to create a directory that would have huge brand recognition, it’s more like an addition to V7 Network that at first is going to get the benefits of being part of a well known network and in the future, in its turn will help the network grow. In addition to that, I really liked John Scott’s idea of adding search boxes on Webmaster Forum and his intention to add the search boxes on the entire V7 Network. This will bring searches and searches bring traffic to the sites listed and as I have said before a directory that can send traffic is better than a high PR directory, at least for me. Now this doesn’t only positively affect the value of the listings but also benefits the entire network, being able to keep your visitors to your network sites for various of their Internet activities is very important.

Other important factors when looking at a directory are the category structure and the search engine saturation. V7N directory has a really nice and really extensive category structure and a excellent search engine saturation with more than 26.000 pages indexed by Google at the time that I write this review. For the PR obsessed people, V7N directory got a nice PR6 during the last PR update and I must say that PR passed nicely to the category pages as well, despite the fact that the extensive category structure results in a lot of subcategories being 3 or 4 levels deep.

Finally, pricing. I have to admit that I hate buying something without knowing how much I need to pay and as you can see here there is no mention on the pricing and I wasn’t able to find a mention in the directory’s pages. I was planing on submitting one site for now but without knowing what I need to pay I just hit the back button, maybe it’s just me but this is my biggest gripe with this directory which I must say is an overall great directory.

Google seems to have a sense of humor. I guess everyone by now has noticed the PR update that happened on 13/7, I know most people refer to it as a 14/7 update but it’s because of the time differences. During this update my directory Your Index got a nice PR6 . However that’s not the point, pagerank according to the description you get when you hover over the PR bar located at the Google Toolbar is “Pagerank is Google’s measure of the importance of this page“. So guess which other page at my directory got a nice pr6 and thus is considered an important page. You probably won’t guess it but it’s the page that from my experience almost no one visits, the Guidelines page. It looks like Google is trying to give directory submitters a hint.

This isn’t about me or my directories but directory submission is fairly easy, nothing extreme is requested by most directories. A proper title, a proper description and adding sites at the most relevant categories is what most directories require. By following these simple guidelines you will surely get a much higher acceptance ration which means more backlinks. I don’t understand why people keyword stuff their descriptions, I can’t see how can this help with SEO, the only thing it can possibly happen is that the directory page where the description is will outrank the actual sites.

I find it especially funny when I see submissions from “professional SEO companies” that scream reject me without even visiting.

Edit to add, this is a description of a site submitted at one of my directories that I just came across (and it’s not something rare).

website, websites, website design, print design, logo design, print, logos, logo, website designer, website designers, websites that work, content management, site design, bespoke websites, java, html

Even if the site is listable there is no way that I am going to accept it with that description. So people submitting to directories please use proper descriptions and you will save both directory oweners time and your time as well and you will get more backlinks for your sites.

It seems that there is a PR update happening today (13/07/2006). I was the first one to report at Digital Point (notice the screenshot ).
Ok, now what is the importance of this PR update for directories (for most other sites imho PR is useless). This seems like another bad update BUT at least it’s better than the 4/4 one. It seems that the only sites that are getting updated are the ones that had no PR before and the ones that got their PR during the 4/4 update. However it’s better because the PR values I see for most sites are reasonable in contrast to the PR that we saw during the last update (a couple of links could have given you a PR6, LOL).
As I have said in the past PR is important for directories because it is one of the most common things that submitters look at before submitting their sites and especially before paying for a submission. During the last update there where a lot of lucky directory owners that saw their directories get PR5s and PR6s (obviously they didn’t worth it). I was keeping an eye on some of those directories (I won’t post names) since link analysis is my favorite part of SEOing. I was seeing that some of the directory owners after that update realised that it was a fluke but they tried to retain the PR they got while others were busy selling sitewide and sponsored links (big mistake). The results are now obvious, those that realised that they were lucky and they needed to do something to take advantage of their luck in the long term did quite well in this update and those that just collected the money and did nothing lost huge amounts of their PR.
Anyway, that’s just a first comment, let’s wait to see if it sticks or if they will roll it back.

I have written this entry about a week ago, it was all ready on my external hard drive and all I had to do was copy it here and publish it. To be honest I am glad I didn’t because right now I have my doubts about what I have written. Not that I changed my mind completely but now that I reread it I believe it’s only targeted to paid directories owners. Basically it was a post saying that I don’t agree with the use of CPC advertising on directories. However I believe it would be appropriate to make a distinction between paid and free directories. I guess owners of free directories need to find a way to monetize their directories and they have every right to do so. They may sell featured links but let’s face it most people will go for the free option unless it’s a very well established directory like abilogic. So what is left? Selling sitewides links and CPC or CPM advertising. To be honest although I am currently not doing any of the above at my directories (I tried adsense for a few hours yesterday) I would prefer adsense over sitewide links. (This change of view probably is due to the fact that I checked how much I have spent on my directories the last couple of months and what I am currently getting in return. Of course my directories are still new but I guess I am impatient)

After saying that I must admit that using adsense on a paid directory is a huge turnoff and I would seriously considered it before paying for any links at a directory that used it. Luckily I can’t think of any right now.

Ok, there goes my well written article, bashing adsense on directories in the trashcan.

Ok, this is just a rant for all the latest Google changes so if you are looking for directory related content just ignore it.
More and more webmasters have been complaining lately about big drops in the SERPs about going supplemental etc. Especially on June 27th some major changes in the SERPs occurred. The common seems to be that a lot of websites went from page 1 to page 5 like there is a new a algorithm in place that penalizes sites by not allowing them to cross the barrier of the 4th of 5th page. Matt Cutts in a comment at his blog said:

I believe any changes on the 27th were refreshing data used by an existing algorithm.

and that:

AKA, that’s what happened. Arubicus, the change went through evaluation just like any other change and showed a positive improvement.

So why are webmaster complaining about poor search results and massive changes?
One might argue that only the ones hit by this refresh are complaining but in my opinion the results are getting worst and worst. More spam sites appear all the time in Google results and legit sites disappear. In my opinion this is the result of Google deciding to go after the “grey hat” techniques that they can easily identify, like link exchanges and the like in combination with their inability to fight the latest wave of pure “black hat” sites and techniques (like the subdomain problem).

This is getting more evident all the time. Now Matt Cutts says that they saw improved results. I really can’t argue since I don’t know their quality control processes and I wouldn’t be surprised if a survey of average users was showing that. So again why are webmasters complaining?

My opinion is that there are a lot of factors that contribute to this. Webmasters are probably the most efficient searchers, they can find what they are looking for in the least amount of time by using very specific searches with long tail queries in combination with operators. In addition to that once they get the results page they can identify spammy sites and relevant sites without the need to visit them while the average user will probably click on one of the first three results (I have noticed from my sites that for some queries moving from number 5 to number 3 can cause a very big increase in traffic). So when webmasters use their very specific queries the number of results is usually very small and there is where you see all the spam sites and there are a lot of them.

Now these spam sites or at least some of them scrape the content that gets delivered to googlebot from various sites across the internet so where does that lead? You guessed it to duplicate content penalties and which sites are affected? You guessed it again the medium to small size sites which are owned by the webmasters complaining and not some company or some organization. These sites because of the penalties not only they loose their multiple keywords rankings but also their main keyword rankings. You might ask what is left then, the answer is simple authority sites that are very hard to get penalized like wikipedia and spam sites. Authority sites dominate the main keyword phrases and spam sites the long tail searches and of course the misspellings and the average Webmaster Joe that has been found guilty of link exchanging and duplicate content is left banging his head on the wall. Isn’t life great at the countryside?

So what is the solution? Matt Cutts advice is to check our sites to see if they break Google’s Quality Guidelines. (One might argue that Google needs to check their index as well)

To be honest reading just the first phrase is enough “Make pages for users, not for search engines.”
So why should I read any further if you are telling me that when I build my website I should not care or think about search engines? Obviously I need since I depend on search engines for traffic but let’s not forget that they depend on webmaster Joe as well for content. The main difference is that they can decide and act fast because only a few people are needed to talk, discuss, evaluate and make decisions while it is impossible for webmasters to decide to follow a common route of actions. Imagine what would happen if all the webmasters from digitalpoint, sitepoint, namepros and all the webmasters forums one day decided to disallow googlebot, boycott adsense and adwords. Of course this isn’t possible to happen but I wouldn’t be surprised if webmasters started putting “Too cool for Google” banners and buttons on their sites like they used to do for IE.

I guess we will just have to wait for Vista.

PS: When I saw my sites disappearing I panicked but I have one advantage over other webmasters. I don’t depend on my sites to live, I have my own office and business that isn’t internet related so I can say WTH I don’t care. However there are webmasters that webmastering is their full time job and Google seems to totally ignore them and leaving them in the dark with answers like (yes it was just a bad data push or a refresh of data) which is rather evil imho. Why? Because they are Google’s content providers and one thing that I learned on the internet is to respect my content providers.

Link building for directories is a hard job (I am talking of course for natural links). Very few people, if any will naturally link to a directory, so directory owners need to try hard to find backlinks. Let’s take a look at some of the available ways to get free natural backlinks.

Directory lists: That’s a good place to start, there are a number of available lists of free and paid directories. Some of them are:
Directory Critic
VileSilencer’s SEO friendly list
Seocompany’s list
Addurl.nu
Tips and Tutorials
Directory Tracker
Directory List
and my favorite and the one that I was keeping to myself (until it was posted on DigitalPoint)
Search Engine Colossus
Infosales
4th Media
Hitslog
Isedb
Ranking Directories
Incoming Links
Directory Source
Site Vortex
Best Web Direcories
Strongest Links
Koopy

There are a few more but you need to search a bit. The good thing with directory lists is that they send traffic, so besides the PR benefit you can get traffic and submissions. Personally not all my directories are listed at the sites above. The main reason is timing, I am waiting for a couple of things to happen before I submit them.
These links are nice but they are not enough because probably all of your competitors will be listed there so if you don’t have any other links pointing to your directory you simply won’t have an advantage over them.
You have to work harder than that, here are a few ways to get backlinks, if I have missed something feel free to add to this list by leaving a comment.
1. Competition Analysis: Analyze the links of the competition and try to identify natural, not bought, not exchanged links. Then try to get a link at the same site by sending a nice email to the webmaster. This is how I found the Search Engine Colossus. Lets look at an example of how you can digg deeper and deeper for links. Let’s say that I was analyzing the directoryX and I found Search Engine Colossus. I send a submission request and get my site listed, do you stop here? No, then I analyze Search Engine Colossus which of course isn’t a competitor but a related site, aged with tons of natural backlinks and with a proper analysis you will sure find more places to add your link and more sites to continue your link analysis.

2. Directory Submission: OK the obvious, submit to many directories and if you are too lazy hire someone to do it for you.

3. Offer Reciprocal Links: I have never tried this technique but I guess that for a directory with decent PR can work quite well. The reason that I am not trying it is that I am afraid that the quality of the links will be very low. A lot of webmasters set up a page especially for reciprocal links and reciprocals directories (some of them don’t even link to this page from anywhere in the site, lol ), so I am afraid that it will only lead to get a lot of links but from “linkfarms”. The only directories that have been doing this and are successful are blog directories. Bloggers (mostly non-webmasters bloggers) are link happy and will gladly provide a backlink especially if you offer a cool little button.

4. Link Bait: Let’s move now to the tough part how can you create link bait for a directory? The obvious way is to start a blog on a subdomain ie. blog.directory.com and use the blog for link baiting. Not all traffic or PR will pass to the directory but it’s better than nothing. I guess even a blog in a different domain can help (Don’t look at me like that I didn’t create this blog for this). After that you need to improvise, here is an idea that I was thinking of to use at one of my directories but I decided not to so I might as well post it in case anyone else wants to try it. Free directories get a lot of spam submissions but they get a few really high quality submissions as well. The idea is to create a Site of the Month-Editor’s Pick or something else like that section. Then create a cool graphic award button and when you get quality submissions send an email saying You have been awarded the editor’s pick award feel free to use this badge at your site (Of course the badge will be linking back to your directory). This is of course pretty rough but you get the idea. Not everyone will add the badge but a few (mainly bloggers ) will probably use it. I got this idea by looking at software download sites and wondering where do they get all of their backlinks. Moral of the story look around and you will find ideas.

5. Network Sites: Obviously again, if you own a network of successful sites it helps a lot. However I believe it is important how you are going to use your sites. I hate giving advice about staff like that so I will stop here.

6. Free Stuff: Everyone loves free stuff, in this case it could be webmaster tools that people can add to their websites (with a link back of course). This is something that a lot of sites like Seochat and DigitalPoint (the geovisitors) have been doing with success.

7. Articles: This is a standard technique to get backlinks, write articles and submit them to article directories, It’s a technique however that I don’t really use, probably because I am too lazy. Another way to use articles is to create an article section at your directory and use it as a link trap. I have seen a relatively new directory (won’t give names) doing this and it got at least one nice PR8 link at an authority website and probably quite a lot of traffic (not bad if you ask me).

Finally keep your eyes open, there are always opportunities to get links, study the big directories and other smaller ones but don’t forget to check similarly structured websites for ideas (see point 4 example). The good thing with directories is that during link building you don’t need to worry to much about anchor text etc. Any link that is on a nice website and that can send you traffic and maybe pass some PR is a good link.

Ok here is a question that I don’t have a clear answer and I would also appreciate some feedback. According to my observations there are three common things that succesful paid for inclusion directories have.
In order of importance:
1. Brand Name
2. Medium to high PR
3. Large number of listings (obviously that takes time and is related with the age of the directory as well)

Let’s look at them one by one

Brand name is probably one of the most important factors. How can you build a recognisable brand name for your directory? The lucky ones where the ones creating directories early when they were just a few of them and webmasters could list by heart the available free and paid directories. However unless you can turn back time that’s not an option. So what can you do?
Name: pick a brandable unique name that others will remember along with a nice domain of course. I see directories named keyworddirectory and there are other directories named directorykeyword. Big mistake in my opinion. Take a look at Umdum, hah! Umdum, wtf does that mean? yet I remember it and that is what is important. Of course this doesn’t relate directly to the initial question but it is an important factor that we shouldn’t forget. Other methods of getting brand recognition, drop the name and a link to your directory wherever you can (don’t spam but don’t loose any opportunities either). Think a couple of ways to differentiate your directory but don’t apply them from the start, apply them gradually and always make announcements about them and turn the announcement into discussion. And yes announcements announcements and again announcements about everything redesigns, new features, promotions, number of listings reached, categories restructure, anything at all. Finally, banner advertising at webmaster related sites could be really helpful although I haven’t done any yet for my directories. Even if you don’t get good ROI you gain brand recognition and to be honest you can never pay enough for brand recognition.
I almost forgot, building a name for yourself at webmasters forums and in general in the webmasters community, that is corelated with the directory is also important.

Medium to high PR: Although I hate it most people prefer to submit to directories that have a decent PR, above 5 is the most common although I have seen successful PR4 directories. Very few people will pay to get listed in a directory with lower PR. Getting a PR of 4 or 5 shouldn’t be hard for most webmasters and I don’t really think that this need any further analysis.

Large number of listings: Ok this isn’t exactly essential but it helps, why? because whether we like it or not webmasters are like any other shopping group, they follow trends, if others submit (especially competitors) they are more likely to submit. So offering free listings at the start is essential for people (that are not well known by webmasters) starting a directory if they want to get their directory populated. Of course there is always the solution of submitting sites manually but it’s not fun . However manual additions by the owner is probably the best way to populate a directory because the quality of the sites will definetely be high. Now that I think of it I could have probably saved a lot of time if I manually added all the links in my directories, I would’t have to spend all that time renaming, changing descriptions and moving submissions **Hint Hint to submitters**

So what is the conclusion of all this? I guess for a guy like me with a directory like Your Index I will have to wait definetely until the next PR update and until it has at least double the listings that it has now. Now about the brand name, I really doubt that I can manage to create a recognisable brand name for at least 6 more months. So I will try and move gradually (Even if I turn to paid and then back to free and then back to paid that’s three announcements ) and see what happens.

This is the first of a series of Directory reviews (mainly paid) that I am planning on writting mainly because a very common question is what directories is it worth submitting to. The first directory in this series will be dirSpace.

DirSpace is a general web directory that accepts free listings for non-profit websites and paid listings for commercial websites. A model that is quite common and I believe one of the best ways to create a directory. Regular listings cost 6$ and Premium listings cost 40$ per year. The prices in my opinion are very reasonable and even cheap.

Let’s take a look now at my usual checklist when I submit to paid web directories.

1. Indexed Pages: dirSpace has over 17.000 pages indexed by Google which a sign of very good search engine saturation.

2. PR: Dirspace has a PR6, very good since all directory owners know that it is really hard to get high PR for directories since very few people will link to a directory. PR has passed in the categories nicely as well and most of them if not all have some PR

3. Design: It has a unique design which for me it means that the owner has spend time and effort on this directory and it is not just one of the many directories that many people create now days promote them for a few weeks and then sell them to make a quick buck.

4. Category Structure: Very comprehensive category structure, really nicely done.

5. Traffic: The only way that I can assess traffic is Alexa stats which are quite inaccurate but at least they give me an idea of the traffic. According to Alexa DirSpace has a rank of 36,569 at the time I write this review which is really good. You may ask why do I care about traffic, the reason is simple traffic to a directory means clicks for the listed sites and this is one of the main reasons I submit to directories. I know that a lot of people submit just for PR and SEO reasons but traffic is equally important to me.

Conclusion: dirSpace is a very good directory and very reasonably priced and is a very good choice for anyone looking to spend some money in paid directory listings.

For one of my directories I use Site-Sift Listings. It’s a free directory script that you can find here. They also offer a paid version that has no real differences from the free script other than it gives you permission to remove the Powered by Site-Sift from your pages. Personally I have paid to remove it for various reasons that I will probably discuss in a future post.
Let’s start from the basics, Site-sift was very easy to install and configure. It looks pretty nice out of the box and just by adding a nice logo you can have a Botw.org style directory. It provides SE friendly URLs that can be crawled easily from the search engine bots and all the listings are search engine friendly. Finally it is quite easy for users
to submit their links, a fact that is very important if you want to get a lot of submissions.

Now let’s go to the negatives.
My biggest gripes with this directory script is that the admin panel is not really user friendly. Some examples:
The awaiting validation page isn’t paginated, so you may ask what is wrong with that? Wait until you get a few hundreds or thousands submissions awaiting validation and then you will see why this is a big problem. Everytime you approve or delete a submission the page reloads and if you have that may listings it becomes time consuming. Recently that I had this problem I decided to do the reviewing from PHPMyAdmin, no I am not kidding.

Another thing that is missing is the mass approve or delete buttons, something like the wordpress comments moderating system would be ideal.

Adding categories or moving them wasn’t thought out very well in my opinion as well. Why? because the categories tree doesn’t allow you to identify parent and child categories easily.

Overall it’s a good script, however I would like a bit more user friendly admin panel *hint hint*