Directories and Search Engines

I had a chance to visit DP after a long absence and was thoroughly amused by some of the posts in the Directories forum – seems nothing has changed.

Little reason to waste your time there; the same folks are still spamming their crappy directory lists, others are still confused as to what constitutes quality, and the Solicitations & Announcements section is nothing more than a spam fest.

I got a chuckle out of one of the posters’ subtle attempt at self promotion of their web directory called LinKernel.

I followed one of the spammy link drops to an article on a directory about “top quality web directories” and surprise, surprise, their own directory is listed.

Top Quality?

You bet!

LinKernel
18 articles total.
8 Featured Listings – 3/8 are listings for their own sites.
807 regular listings sprinkled across 447 categories.
Can’t seem to find any inbound links that were earned.

I think you get the idea….

Here’s a quick tip to save directory owners and editors some grief in the future.

Ir’s not uncommon for domains to expire and get snatched up by some one wanting to take advantage of the traffic, inbound links or PageRank.

The new content could be undesirable or even malicious and can really degrade your visitors’ experience. Linking to bad neighborhoods could possibly cause some problems with search engines.

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The amount of misinformation on webmaster forums about DMOZ (Open Directory Project) is almost overwhelming and only leads to confusion, frustration and disappointment for the average webmaster.

Let’s clear up a number of misconceptions and try to improve your chances of actually getting a suggestion reviewed and possibly listed.

First off, we need to understand that the directory project’s purpose is not a listing service for website owners or their webmasters. Yes, site suggestions are accepted, but they are under no obligation to process or respond to them.

Editors are volunteers and may choose to perform a variety of tasks which may be of more importance than reviewing submissions from the general public. Updates, errors, category reorganizations, taxonomy, hierarchy, internal projects, editor applications and internal discussions all probably rank well above the mundane task of reviewing suggested sites.

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Scam? Yep.

Bid directory owners will never see it as such, but yes, bid directories are nothing but a scam.

What is a bid directory? A bid directory lists sites based on the amount bid, with the highest paying sites listed at the top of the list. The top bidders are also listed in order of bid amount on the front page (where every one can see just how big of an idiot you really are).

This directory model doesn’t list sites based on merit. Quality content? Doesn’t matter. Timely information? Doesn’t matter. All it takes is a little ignorance and willingness to part with your money.

Many bid directories are placed on recently acquired deleted domains with foolbar PageRank. It’s easy to identify the scammers on popular webmaster forums peddling links based on the Google PageRank of an unrelated domain. The domain name itself should be the first indication that someone is looking to profit off of the ignorance of others.

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Back in September we made a few changes to our web directory eWebPages.org related to our submission form and I’m quite pleased with the results after 6 months. The quality of submissions have improved somewhat, and I no longer find myself constantly arguing with webmasters about titles and descriptions that are edited prior to acceptance.

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