Well, I had some free time on my hands these few days and so I decided to do some checkup on directories. What I did was to search on popular directories for supplemental results and see how many pages are in that index. To my surprise,  a lot of directories seemed to have a significant amount of pages in supplemental index. Even big name directories are not spared. Alive Directory has about one quarter of their pages in supplemental. Even Ask Directory which has a huge amount of indexable content has about 10% of their pages in supplemental. Even DMOZ has about 50% in supplemental (thanks Scolls of Webwobot for this information). Are directories being penalized by Google for excessive linking? Or is Google trying to reduce the weightage of directory links (and thus reduce their importance) by sending some pages into supplemental? Or is there just some stupid algorithm which makes directories a target for supplemental?

And before you shout the doomsday cry for directories, you should also note that a lot of other types of websites are also being sent into supplemental. Even blogs which Google supposedly love so much. But from what I see, they didn’t suffer as much as directories. How about you guys? Are your directories facing this problem? Try as I might, I don’t seen to be able to reduce the amount of pages going into supplemental for my directories. Even my Authority Sites Directory which has unique descriptions and highly regarded sites wasn’t spared this massacre. Will someone tell me what to do?

I think that this tool can help directory owners review their submission listings faster.  All you have to do is to load in a list of URLs and this tool will check for you whether it is a parked domain, checks for spam wordings, has how many websites on it’s IP address, how many advertisements it has, how many scripts it has and so on.

Although not perfect, it should be of some help to the overworked directory owner. Especially for the free general web directory owner who has to review hundreds of sites per day. This tool can help simplify some of the process. I think I could add some suggestions myself. Check for PageRank, check for spammy URLs, check for the amount of indexable content and give a preview of the website in question. You can eliminate a lot of spam sites with these few criteria. The rest, well, you have to manually review them. One more little tip, I always reject sites with too many advertisements, especially on the frontpage. Seriously, if they put like 4 or 5 adsense all over the page, you should not approve them into your directory.

Note that this tool is still in beta and currently not all the features are working.

Not sure what are bid for links directories? They are sort of a directory which sells “positions” or “rankings” of links based on how much you bid them for. So if you bid higher(and thus pay more), you get better positions until someone outbids you. Basically it is like advertisements and if you pay more, you get better exposure. And nowadays this kind of directories are getting more and more popular. You can see at least a few popping out every day. So I put forward this question, are bid for links directories really directories? Are they able to provide relevant sites to certain topics or subjects for their users? Or are they just link sellers? And do they drive targeted traffic to their listings?

Well, if you look at normal web directories, you can see that they have featured or sponsored listings. These listings are usually on top or are in better visible positions. Some even have different pricings for different types of featured links so I was wondering whether these are the same business model as bid for the links directories just a bit less obvious?  What are you thoughts on this?

Agreed? I mean just look around you. There are hundreds of new directories popping up every week. Just go to forums which allows directories to be announced. You will be shocked. And most of these directories are general web directories, all with the main purpose of selling links and nothing more. Sure, we do see some of these directories with new “features” like them “deep links” mods and stuff, but in the end, it’s still mainly about links. Nobody visits a general web directory to find sites anymore. Why? Because basically, they are the same everywhere. They all have nearly the same listings and ultimately the same content. Even when a directory has real traffic, these traffic goes mainly to the directory’s blog, article sections, news section or download section. What little traffic that then flows to the directory itself is not really worth mentioning Nearly all the traffic comes from webmasters and SEOers doing submissions.

And since I am a directory owner myself, I know it’s getting harder and harder to promote my directory. There is just way too many of them out there and it’s difficult to differentiate between them. I am sure that even successful web directory owners are starting new directories, in the hope to bank on their success and reputation to gain customers and clients. With that being said, if you look at successful general web directories, you will see that a good portion of clients are actually other directory owners. New directories are fueling the growth of old and more established directories (and their offspring).

It is easy to start a directory. There is no doubt about that. So easy as to just install a script on your shared hosting site, do a category dump and then place a few links here and there to promote your directory and wait to get submissions and money from these submissions. Really? If so, I guess most people will be starting the directories in the thousands and become rich in no time. And truly there will be no more hunger, pain, disease and wars in the world. We have just created an Utopia.

It looks like there is a war brewing soon between two egocentric personalities involved in the development of PhpLinkDirectory. On one side is David, the owner of PhpLinkDirectory and on the other is Rob, a famous modder. Looking at it from an outsiders angle, Rob seems to claim that David doesn’t provide enough support to his customers and left it to others like him to fill in the gaps. And Rob seemed very pissed when he isn’t paid to do what David was supposed to do in the first place. And then we have name calling as usual - Rob calling David a liar. To add into the mix, there are people claiming that the reason why some features are not added into the PhpLD script is because David supports one modder and doesn’t want the modder’s income to be affected if the script comes de facto with that particular feature. As well as how poor the support is for PhpLD. Worse, they claim that David steals ideas from other modders and “sell” it as his own without giving any compensation or even giving credit to the original developers.

David on the other hand, claims that he does compensate developers. And he claims that his script has provided modders good opportunities to sell their own scripts for profit and he has helped them grow their business.

Well, for me, I have to say that PhpLD is a great script at a very low price. It gave people like me a chance to build a directory when other scripts will not be affordable. It is also popular enough for me to find low cost scripts to enhance my directory. But I have to say, the support is terrible. Messages in their paid support forums don’t get answered sometimes and would you believe it, they tell you to wait till the next version comes out. And their templates won’t (or may not) work for the next version. But for US$35,what do you expect? Rob charged me US$25 to mod probably 3-4 lines of code already and I think it took him like 1 hour or so. Well, guys always look at both sides of a coin before making any judgement.

Some related forum posts:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=320143

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=320270

We can have it free! Yes, if you are using PhpLinkDirectory (any version), you can head down to rakCha resources and see how you can make your directory’s detail pages look cooler with keywords and all! This mod assumes that you already have Search Engine Friendly URLs enabled and uses Apache as your webserver.

Please note that adding this mod will immediately render all your old backlinks obsolete and you may see a huge drop in SERPs and all your PageRank for your detail pages will be gone. What?? This is an SEO Friendly Details Pages mod and you will see a drop in rankings?? Yes, that’s the problem with changing URLs. Everything goes haywire. I would not recommend you to use this mod if you are an established directory. Use this mod if you are just starting out and have no worries about SERPs and rankings. Or you could do a 301 redirect of your old URLs to your new URLs. Don’t ask me how, I have no idea. Good luck and remember to say thanks to the author by commenting in his blog.

In digitalpoint forums, someone posted about Web Directories being garbage. While I cannot completely agree with him that this is so, there are a lot of directories which are in fact nothing more than link farms. Yes, those are garbage. I have seen “directories” with just thousands upon thousands of links, without much content. And they are basically useless to anyone.

However, there are a lot of directories which are not garbage. They are very useful, both in terms of getting rankings and traffic. And some directories can help your new site get indexed faster. But for me, I doubt that general web directories are ever good at driving traffic to their listings. Niche directories on the other hand, will be a good source of targetted traffic for their listings. Why? Search engines are rather bad at finding these kinds of sites, thus a human edited niche directory will be more of a value to searchers and visitors.

It would be interesting to note that since Google and their links started to play a huge part of our Internet, web directories have evolved from just listing sites on a topic or a subject to an powerful SEO tool. So, another point to directories. You may think that I am biased to directories because I own 2 directories myself, but in all seriousness, directories will remain an important part of the Internet till Search Engines come up with a foolproof way to find relevant results.

Are you guys fed up with spammers coming to your directory and submitting spam sites? Are you tried of spending hours clearing up spam listings from your directory? Are you angry that your current captcha system is useless against smart spammers? Are you sick of seeing the same crappy sites being submitted over and over again in your directory? Are you sick of cleaning up after you vomitted blood? If you are, I have the perfect solution for your spam problem - Spank Mod!

What this mod does is to create a special feature in your PhpLD directory which spanks spammers if they come to your directory and submit spam sites. Yes, it is a good deterence against spammers who don’t want their butt to be spanked. Most normal spammers don’t, so you are safe.

If you are interested, please visit: Spank Mod You will find it a worthwhile investment!

Don’t let the name fool you, it’s not really a site which critics directories. It’s more like a listing of directories, both free and paid directories (general and niche). It has a ranking system for users to rate a directory, however from what I can see, it’s been abused to the point where it is no longer useful to the normal user. If you looked at their “high ranked” directories, those isn’t actually the best. But still, this site has a very comprehensive listing of directories which will be useful for you to do your link building. They have over 3700 directories as well as 500 article directories  in their database for you to submit your site to. All these in one site, very convenient I have to say.

If you own a directory yourself, you can also add it to their database. They have recently done a little facelift for their site, so some of the links are out. Don’t worry, I am sure they will get it working soon enough.

Please check out: Directory Critic.

Are you in anyway looking for Interior Designers or contractors? Perhaps you are planning to redo your kitchen or your pool area? Or you just have the new keys to your condo and you are looking for a contractor to build your dream home? Or maybe you are planning to redesign your office to suit your new corporate logo and identity? Or just maybe you are looking for some way to outclass your neighbour with the 4 storey Terrace? Well, fear not. I have just the list for you.

Please visit: Singapore Contractors and Interior Designers Listings. This listing has over 140 over companies specializing in renovation, construction, interior design and consultancy and I will be adding more soon. Take your pick from here. You can view their previous works and profiles from their websites and see which is suitable for you.

And if you have a directory and you are not willing to spend a few bucks on it to get Anon’s Deeplinks mod, you can try out rakCha’s solution. This free deeplink mod is for both phpkinkdirectory and eSyndicat.