Directories Blog

Creating the category structure for a directory is one of the most important factors that will determine whether a directory will be profitable or not. In my directory career I have built only one category structure (I own two directories but I bought the first one) and I must say I didn’t do a great job. However watching the submissions coming in made me realize my mistakes. For example when I started creating my categories I started with the category of arts and really paid a lot of attention to make it complete but not too deep and by the time I reached shopping I was bored. BIG BIG mistake, very few people will submit a paid listing in the Arts category or subcategories, the categories that will bring paid submissions are Business, Shopping, and Internet. These are the categories that need the most attention and a lot of thought.

Let’s look at some examples of categories structures and try to find the reasoning the pros and cons of them.

Let’s start with wowdirectory, it has thousands of categories if you combine the regular with the regional categories and a lot of cross-linking of categories. Is this good, in my opinion yes because the listings will not be crammed all in the top categories and the sites submitted will be listed along with a very closely related sites. However, by creating so deep categories they made it hard for the PR to pass so deep so they might be loosing submissions because webmasters will not pay to get listed in a PR1 or PR2 category. In addition to that there is always the danger that some of the categories will not even be cached (especially with all the latest Google problems) and therefore lose submissions once more from people that check if the category page is cached. However I doubt that is the case with Wowdirectory since it is very well indexed (I believe the cross-linked categories helped a lot). Finally one last problem that I see is that especially at the beginning there will be a lot of empty categories, this might be a problem because these categories could easily fall in the supplemental hell.

Now let’s look at a completely different approach. DirectoryMarker is not as well known as wowdirectory but is a successful web directory. Notice the number of categories displayed, just 201. Now what is the benefit of that? You can be sure that with a few good backlinks it will get crawled completely and that the PR will pass quite easily even in the most deep categories. Of course here are also helpful the alphabetical categories that provide a very good inner link scheme structure. However the bad thing is that some people may be turned off by the fact that will be listed side by side with not completely relevant sites.

So what is the best way to build your category structure. In my opinion the best way would be to create a category structure with about 400-500 categories. A complete but not so extensive category list and then expand it as the directory grows. This might also help with SEO because according to my observations (keep in mind I am no SEO guru) Google and the other search engines like sites that grow at a steady pace.

Now how about buying a category structure or copying one (let’s say DMOZ). To be honest I don’t think that this is such a good idea, I realize that there are very few things that you can do differently but when creating a category structure but even these small things can help a lot. For example you can add custom meta tags at every category (if the script allows it). Why is this important? Let’s take a look at an example again. Check this Google Query, you see that Google only list only two results from Skaffe.com one of the most well know directories (homepage and the blog). Let’s now see why this happens Google Query. Aha, all the pages have the same description “Searchable human edited international directory with family safe viewing filtered for spam and adult content.” so Google thinks that they are all similar(not supplemental, just too similar for Google). This of course doesn’t help SEO a lot and I would believe that search engine rankings aren’t as high as they could potentially be. So how can this affect the directory? Worst rankings=>Lower Traffic=> Lower number of clicks at the listings and probably lower number of submissions. Finally if you can come up with a unique category structure you have a lot more chances to be successful, Gimpsy: I rest my case.

So those are a couple of things that I believe every directory owner should keep in mind when starting a directory or changing his category structure.

Disclaimer: Keep in mind that I am still in the learning process and I am not a native English Speaker (don’t you dare make fun of my English)

PS: If any of the directory owners want me to remove their sites from the article I will be happy to use different directories as examples.

I have just recently launched a new Website Directory called Your Index. This directory is based on the esyndicat directory script and as a result is SE friendly, meaning that it provides direct URLs for the listed sites without any redirects. Currently it has a total of 426 categories. As you can see the category structure is not as big as the ones of other directories that have a few thousands categories. The reason for that is that I decided that I will expand the category structure as the directory grows instead of creating a huge and very deep category structure and end up with hundreds of eampty categories. Currently about 300 hundred sites have been approved and are listed in the directory and about 50 or so are waiting in the review que. I am planning on promoting this directory slowly but steadily because I really want it to become a success.
The directory is family friendl;y so no gambling, adult etc links will be accepted.
Now what are you waiting for? Go on and submit your sites, it’s free.

Zeal, one of the largest directories has closed. This isn’t exactly breaking news since it was announced about ten days ago that at the end of March Zeal will go offline. However now it’s official since there is the message below posted at Zeal’s frontpage.

We thank you all for being a part of the Zeal community and contributing your time and knowledge to the Directory. LookSmart has decided to focus internal resources on objectives that are more central to our business strategy and Zeal.com has been shut down. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you again for contributing to the Zeal community.

We think avid Zeal users will appreciate the large and vital community at Furl.net (www.Furl.net). Furl is an online book marking service that helps save information that’s important to you, share it with friends and see what others are saving.

With Furl you can:

* Save Web pages to a personal, permanent archive with 5GB of storage
* Revisit the full text of your favorite Web pages
* Share articles and information with friends and family members with simple email pass-along tools
* Use Furl as a platform for social networking and discovering useful information
* Share articles and information with people that share common interests using RSS feeds
* See what other Furl members are saving and sharing

Whether you are browsing the Web, travel planning, recipe sharing, house hunting or researching, Furl is a wonderful tool. Join the thousands of people that are using Furl every day to find, save and share information that is important to them

I guess Looksmart decided to focus more on Furl.

Technorati Tags: Zeal, Directory, Directories, closing, closed

DMOZ or as it is called the Open Directory Project is probably the number one directory that webmasters want to get their sites listed. Why is that? Simply because it has a nice PR9 and also the fact that Google uses DMOZ data for it’s own directory. Most webmasters believe that because of that a DMOZ listing can bring higher SE rankings. I don’t know whether that’s true but being listed in DMOZ has certainly a lot of pros.

First of all, most DMOZ categories have high PR so even if there wasn’t any other advantage you still get a nice high PR backlink. Another advantage of being listed in DMOZ is that a lot of sites (including Google) are scarping the DMOZ data so besides the backlink from DMOZ you also get a number of other backlinks. However Google has starting deindexing DMOZ clones (I wonder if they are going to ban their own directory as well), or showing them as supplemental results. Nevertheless, imho any backlink is better than no backlink.

So is it worth submitting to DMOZ? I have to say yes, despite all the problems and all the rumors about the corrupt DMOZ editors that we are going to discuss in future posts, it is free and it just takes a minute and if (and when) you get accepted you enjoy a number of benefits mentioned above.

Technorati Tags: Directory, Directories, DMOZ, Open Directory Project

Welcome to the directories blog. The main theme of this blog as it is obvious from the title will be Web Directories, including free, paid, niche or general directories. We are going to talk about which directories are worth the trouble of submitting, about the widely used directory scripts and about directories development and promotion. So stay tuned (I always wanted to say that) .

Technorati Tags: Directories, Introduction