Why am I asking this? My friend from TopClickMedia, a search engine optimisation company tells me that SEO friendly directory doesn’t only mean the directory has SEO friendly URL, it should also strive to rank for keywords related to it’s category listings to have a significant impact on listed URLs rank.

I got my directories to rank for instant approval directory, fast approval directory etc. but I would like to be on first page for people like Dmegs or VMOptions. What kind of link building activities do you do for your directory?

Approval depends on a lot of factors, some of them are below:
– Selection of title (are you using too many commas in title? Are you using repeated keywords?)
– Description (is it a description written in third person narrative or it’s a string of keywords or it’s a sales pitch)
– Category (typically loans / insurance categories see a lower level of approvals)
– Email used (if you use gmail or yahoo accounts for submission you can expect slightly lower approval rates)
– Adsense / affiliate links on site (if you have a lot of pop up ads or adsense units, quality directories won’t accept your submission)
– Your website’s PR (unfortunately some directory owners think PR2+ websites are quality websites and they only approve those)

Hopefully if you keep the above mentioned factors in mind, your approval rate can increase.

What triggered this post was an infraction for a recent post I made in an incorrect category. I agree I made a mistake and was promptly ‘reminded’ about it by the infraction. I made the change in my post and requested mod to move the thread and it was promptly moved. I was totally impressed.

Mods are quite active because I see members banned immediately when they send spam PMs. Some parts of the forums look overlooked but otherwise the forum is healthy and has many old and new members participating everyday.

Hello, i guess this is as good of a place as any to post and let you know. I went to subscribe to your RSS feed, and when i clicked it i got an error that said “Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING” followed by other gibberish that scrolled off the screen. I had to force the page to stop loading because it locked up my browser. Cheers.

Genius, isn’t it? Most bloggers will be forced to approve and respond to it. Thanks to the comment spammer from software.best-antivirus.org who was using hotpepper113@ymail.com email id, I can tell others about this generic spam comment.

Many of these (more than 200) are keywordluv blogs just like this one. What are you waiting for? checkout the updated search engine and find all the dofollow blogs you want.

The free versions however are being used by many fly-by-night free directories because the script doesn’t cost anything, hosting is cheap and many hosts allow unlimited sites in their packages. Someone can make 100s of directories with free scripts by just buying domains in bulk (and that’s exactly some people have been doing). Maintaining 100s of directories is of course very difficult and hence automated approvals are the only method to keep these directories active. All these activities are giving a bad name to directory industry and premium directory owners suffer most because of this.

I personally think free versions are good specially for free general directories when new webmasters are just using their new directory to get a feel of the industry and work required to promote a directory. Some people always manage to abuse anything that’s good and that’s exactly what is happening with these free directory scripts. But these directories will die a natural death and people will be discouraged to make more directories if submitters decide not to use these type of directories.

What do you think about free versions of directory scripts?

Free Directory List

DirectoryRoll is updated almost everyday and new directories added to the list on new directories page. You can find list of directories on unique IP addresses by sorting the list and can also see PR, and backlink details for each directory. Directory owners can submit their directories by a simple forum announcement and bad directories can also be reported via email.

Track Submissions

Many webmasters submit their site to 100s of directories and face duplicate submission problem when submitting their site to directories after some time. This results into wasted time and money for website owner. With DirectoryRoll you can also track all the directories where you have already submitted your website.

Social Bookmarking List

Webmasters can also find nofollow and dofollow social bookmarking sites to promote their sites.

What went wrong?

As expected for any method that was making money some people started abusing directory submissions. It takes less than 20 minutes to get a new directory up and running with some commonly available directory scripts. People started making 100s of directories and guaranteed directory listings were hugely popular (some people still love those). When people start selling links blatantly to manipulate Google’s algorithm it was bound to take some step and it made examples out of some big directory names. Besides this, quality of directories has gone down significantly with each directory looking like a cheap clone of another one.

Are they really dead?

There are two type of people who say directory submission doesn’t work. We have already talked about the ignorant type who are just repeating what they heard elsewhere without bothering to test the hypothesis. The other type has tried directory submissions and have seen a decline in ROI (return on investment) on directory submission. I won’t dispute this; directory submissions can hardly move a keyword in SERPs if it has good competition. What these webmasters need is to outsource directory submission to people who can do it at cheaper rates. You need to find people who are still submitting to directories manually and who are not in turn outsourcing it to others thereby increasing the overall cost.

One can still get a PR 2 or PR 3 with 1000 directory submissions and can still reach first page if competition is not very high. I will ask directory submission bashers to try it out for one of their sites and then make an opinion about it.

This site uses KeywordLuv. Enter YourName@YourKeywords in the Name field to take advantage.

I will roll out a commenting policy soon, I would love to link to your website/blog/directories if your comment adds to the blog, gives me an advice or is otherwise useful. I don’t need thank you comments etc. You can thank me by visiting my sponsors and buying from them.

Comments are welcome but oneliners will be promptly deleted, Akismet has been good at stopping spam but if you commenting manually and don’t have much to add, don’t bother, I will mark your comment as spam.

Happy commenting! Don’t spam me!