Fuzzuck.com

Interesting concept.

You hear mention of this phrase quite often during discussions about web directories. It’s often said that you can judge a directory by its editorial integrity (or lack thereof).

Wikipedia gives the following definition for integrity:

Integrity is the basing of one’s actions on an internally consistent framework of principles. Depth of principles and adherence of each level to the next are key determining factors. One is said to have integrity to the extent that everything he does and believes is based on the same core set of values. While those values may change, it is their consistency with each other and with the person’s actions that determine his integrity.

Something that has really caught my attention is that most general topic web directories promoted at popular webmaster forums primarily feature other directories.

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Back in July, we submitted a site to DMOZ. We walked through the steps of selecting a category, writing a title and description that might be accepted and submitting.

From looking at the last update date at the bottom of the Home – Home Improvement – Furniture category, our suggested site was accepted within a month of submission:

Furniture Care Tips – Short articles on care and maintenance for various types of furniture.

The title was accepted as submitted, and the description was edited. While I may feel that my suggested description was the better of the two, the listed description offers a brief overview about the sites content.

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Our New Webmaster Portal and an Invitation to the Private Beta

Shortly after that day in March when we had to take the  link: operator offline, a small team was formed in Redmond. Its singular focus: to build the next-generation set of tools, content and resources for SEO professionals and webmasters (and get  link: back in your hands). Creatively named Webmaster Portal (we’re really good at marketing), it will be a single, friendly place to find all tools and information relating to Live Search SEO. Initially we’ll support these scenarios:

• Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot is effectively crawling and indexing your site
• Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
• Statistics about your website
• Consolidation of content submission resources
• New content and community resources

It’s expected to go Live later this year, and in the mean time, Live is looking for participants in their private beta program.

Check out Live Search’s Weblog for information on how to express your interest in participating in the beta program.

The Open Directory Project, aka DMOZ is a directory that has intrigued webmasters from the very beginning.

Claims that a listing within this directory is a must if you want to rank well in the search engines is still being perpetuated, and the less someone knows, the more important this really seems.

After you’ve been around for awhile, you soon realize that getting into DMOZ is not what it was touted to be, nor have you sky-rocketed in the search engines as a result of it.

It’s just another link. It might have some authority factor – the listing is human edited prior to inclusion and the search engines to take this into account. How much emphasis is placed on this is relatively unknown, but most feel it’s diminishing as search engine algorithms evolve and they become less reliant on the human factor.

It doesn’t hurt to submit a site for inclusion and may actually help your site a little. So let’s look at the process and submit a site to the Open Directory Project.

The site we’ve chosen to submit is Furniture Care Tips (furniturecaretips.com) and from reviewing their submission guidelines, it appears that this site meets the standards for inclusion. It’s not an affiliate site or over-run with advertising and it provides rich, unique content that’s generally not found on other sites (we don’t know about the scrapers so we tend to generalize).

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