Yes, indeed. My local small business directory - www.sgsmallbiz.com has gained Authority Status by Google. I am pleasantly surprised myself. If you don’t know what this Authority Status means, well, it is when you do a search on let’s say “Singapore Small Business Directory” on Google, you will see that the first result is slightly different from the rest. They have additional links included in the first search result. From what I have gathered, it is meant to say that this site has something more to offer and Google has gained it more “value” and “weightage”. First of all, I am not sure whether this is true or not, but from what I know, it seems that Google does place more weight on these sites than the rest. Although the mechanics of it, we won’t know unless we are one of Google’s engineers, but look at it this way, if the site isn’t offering their viewers something extra, then why did they place the extra links there in the first place? There should be something different from the rest of the search results, in Google’s eyes.

One thing about this Singapore Small Business Directory is that I have added most of the listings myself.  About 90% of all the listings I have sourced myself. This isn’t the one of the web directories out there which waits for people to submit their site to. I did some very comprehensive searches on Google, Yahoo and other sites and resources to get those links. It took me over 2 years to get about 2500 listings in the directory. Sure, it is not as big as some of the bigshot business directories out there, but do note that this is a one-man show and I usually add the listings only in the evening. The daytime, I am stuck at work so I can’t be adding the listings. When I stated this directory, all I wanted was to have a lot of customers who would be willing to pay big bucks to get listed on my directory. But then I realized that if I do it this way, then this directory won’t get the content (in this case listings) needed to attract visitors. And without visitors, this directory is just useless. So I decided to add business listings myself and this way, this directory will slowly build up useful content for it’s visitors.

I think one of the ways Google could have noticed this business directory is that the number of visitors to this site is increasing. In the past (maybe about 6 months back), I usually get about 900 visitors to the directory per day. Now, I get about 1,400 visitors per day! And most of the visitors come from Google. This could be one of the ways Google figures out how useful a site is to their visitors. This is of course only a guess.