Directories and Search Engines

Here’s a run down on some of my favorite Internet Blog Directories; these blog directories are the  ones that should actually pay some dividends just by having a listing there. Be it a little more juice on Google or some actual live visitors to your blog, these are the directories I’ve used in the past with good results.

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1. BOTW Blog Directory
http://blogs.botw.org/

Selective blog directory features a nice cross section of the best blog sites with at least 6 months of active posting and rich content; only lists blogs which meet their own minimum criteria for inclusion. Also offers the opportunity to volunteer as an editor.

Definitely one of the best places to have your blog listed. Current fee for review is $149,99 annually or $299.99 one time fee. There is a free submit option with no time guarantee that your submission will be reviewed.

It’s probably a safe bet that in order to get a free listing, you’ll probably need to submit a high quality blog to a category that’s under represented.

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If you read around the majority of the forums you wouldn’t think so with all of the complaining by numerous webmasters about the amount of time they’ve been waiting to have a submission reviewed.

I know of a number of submissions that have been reviewed and listed in recent months, so I’ll attest to the fact that yes, they are reviewing submissions and adding listings that meet their general guidelines.

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And most webmasters just don’t get it.

They flock to these lists like moths to a flame and wonder why they get nothing in return but a bunch of spam in their inbox, or links that are never indexed by the search engines.

Well, let’s take a look at the directory lists’ characteristics and we might see why it’s a waste of time submitting to the so called directories listed there.

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In the past if you were penalized by the most popular search engine Google, it was pretty much a death sentence.

You could completely clean up the site, file a reinclusion request and own up to the various methods you’ve employed to try and gain an advantage over your competitors.

Things such as inflating your link popularity through excessive link exchanges, buying links, cloaking, hidden text or hiding content from your visitors, and the list goes on.

Your site may be added back to the index after a review and you served some time in the penalty box, and you might even get some of your toolbar PageRank back. But the site would never really enjoy the traffic and rankings and that it could have pre-penalty phase even if you weren’t coloring outside the lines.

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If you own a directory using one of the off the shelf scripts you might notice that there’s a number of short comings which may make some of your editing tasks a bit more challenging.

Some will permit you to ban certain words from the titles, URLs or descriptions and automatically delete those submissions or there are mods that you can add to the back-end that will do the same.

This saves quite a bit of time as you don’t have to delete the undesirable submissions for pharmacy products, adult entertainment or other sites you choose not to list.

Most of the scripts don’t handle foreign languages very well and you can get inundated with spam from certain European block countries. Another short coming of the majority of these scripts is that they allow automated submissions which by-pass the captcha and write to the data-base.

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