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So there’s about 2 weeks left in the DirectoryContest.com contest and many of the participants are scurrying for that last push to try and get their sites to the top of Google’s results on February 6, 2007 at 10:00am PST.
I’m seeing quite a bit of link purchasing still going on in an attempt to outrank others at the finish line. Some of the top sites have up to 17,000 links pointing to their entry page, which is a detail page for the contest site. Amazing.
It’ll be difficult to determine just which directories provide the best overall value when this is finished as it appears to have turned into another SEO contest.
The current standings in Google’s search results for the term “directorycontest.com” are as follows:
Trincas.org
Ask-Dir.com
Gii.in
Global-Weblinks.com
eWebPages.org
Index-it.net
Romow.com
Web1Directory.com
LinksArena.com
HotBizDir.com
What’s been interesting is watching the SERPs shift and following some of the trails set down by the contest participants.
Looking at the results it’s easy to see that the predominant factor is not the strength of the directory, but rather the promotional efforts of the directory owners.
eWebPages.org is a relatively new general web directory, launched on August 1, 2006. The editors are hoping to build a genuine quality reference resource and decided it would better serve their clients to concentrate their efforts on improving the quality and functionality of the directory.
Several new mods to the original script have been incorporated or are planned for the near future that will benefit the directory visitors, editors and submitters.
The listing detail pages now include additional web site resources, providing increased visibility for the most important pages of a site. Directory visitors can go directly to important pages within a site without having to navigate down from the homepage, as seen on the NASCAR details page.
All in all, it’s been very interesting to watch the SERPs and web pages in the results. We wish all of the contestants the best of luck in the final 2 weeks.
So there’s been a slight preview of the PageRank toolbar export on a few of the 216.239.51.* data centers today and unsurprisingly, it didn’t last very long.
The usual discussion forum buzz and jubilation was evident at DigitalPoint and included the usual comments regarding the brief glimpse of the updated values.
Pixel envy is still rampant, and there’s quite a bit of disappointment being expressed over the lack of a visual display in relation to the link development efforts of some.
Others are already trying to cash in on the glimpse and are advertising link sales based on this glimpse or glitch, whichever you’d like to call it.
Always being curious about the future I’ve been pondering Google’s efforts to make it much more difficult for webmasters attempting to reverse engineer the algo, manipulate PageRank and the SERPs.
I’m guessing that in the future, Google will make a few changes to how certain information is presented, such as the toolbar PageRank display, search results for commands used by a small minority (webmasters) in an effort to reduce spam.
What I’m guessing we’ll soon see:
A variation in Toolbar PageRank values across data centers. It will be more difficult to acertain the most recent PageRank toolbar values if there are various values presented simultaneously. Rather difficult to broker links based on PageRank when values aren’t consistent.
A limitation on the total results displayed for advanced search operators such as link:yoursite.com. I’ll go one further and suggest that Google will limit the number of results for advanced search operators to 1000, regardless of the actual number of results. Expect to see Results 1- 10 of about 1000 linking to yoursite.com in the blue status bar regardless of the actual total sometime in the near future. ;)