Niche Switch

After working through a number of my notes, I have finally got around to post the How to make money of your directory guide. All and any suggestions are welcome. I hope to continue updating it as time allows and new resources and informations emerge.

I guess it would be possible to make it two or three times longer….but aimed at providing as much info in as little space possible. I for one tend to postpone reading large guides, not matter how valuable, almost indefinitely.

On directory forums and other professional discussion forums, it’s more and more being talked about low-cost bulk directory submission services that are ruining the directory owner’s joy from running their pet projects (a.k.a. directories), by submitting hundreds and hundreds of bottom quality websites, and generally doing rather poor job with submissions for their clients.

Thus The Pagerank God came forth and ruled, “though shall be your ten commandments from now on”:

1. Thou shalt not ignore each directory’s rules.
2. Thou shalt not put your interests before your client’s.
3. Thou shalt not use autosubmitters.
4. Thou shalt not promise unrealistic acceptance rates, and generally misguide the client, just to get the job.
5. Thou shalt not use one email address for all your clients jobs.
6. Thou shalt not accept clients with junk websites.
7. Thou shalt not submit to top categories, when relevant subcategories are available.
8. Ask your clients to ammend their websites, description and titles, whenever you think it is appropriate.
9. Honour the directory list you use.
10. Do not worship the Pagerank God.

Hey….you see that Pagerank God is a tough guy, but has some sense of humour at least . What? Nah, that’s not me, I just helped him transcribe for us earthlings (either telepathy or sql injection vulnerability in my brain’s operation system, not sure what it was). And no, I don’t worship him (I’m almost certain it’s him, not her).
That’s what happens to those who worship the directory devil. It has something to do with the Holy Hand Grenade, hehe.

This really annoys me a lot.

Well…sometimes I only laughed at it in despair.
People will purchase a domain name like free-directory.tld, guaranteed-free-submission.tld, a-free-link.tld, etc., all with the intention to start a directory, and all names presupposing it to be a free one.

Then, they only allow paid submissions.

Paid-only submissions to free directories make as much sense to me as going to a jazz concert only to get a punk rock band delivered as a last-moment subsitute.

And I don’t even believe in last-minute subsitutes (aka change of plan decisions) in this case. It’s just about tricking people.

If you see such, even if you got a budget for paid links, I highly advise you NOT to pay them a cent. Paying to tricksters will usually only benefit you for a very very short time, if ever.

a citation from the classic : “There is a new directory born every minute.”

But why? Isn’t ther plenty of them already? Isn’t market saturated? The answer would probably take a committee of seo experts, directory specialists, psychologists and economists, but I will inmodestly try to tackle it by myself:

1. pure boredome
2. to take a sneak peak on and inspiration from the website and topics others are working on
3. to make money
4. for swapping links with others
5. to feel the power and satisfy the ego (well….you will not get the power over others lifes, but power over approving or disapproving their links can be also satisfying for some)
6. to start another DMOZ or Yahoo
7. because they hate DMOZ and want to take it by storm
8. because they have a domain name they have no clue what to do with
9. to test the directory script
10. because a friend and neighbour have one too
11. to collect the email addresses of chicks (oh…..sorry ladies)
12. to collect email addresses and spam submitters
13. to promote their services
14. to collect passwords
15. just because they can, like someone pointed out on their directory

It’s completely beyond me what’s the value in tracking the acceptance of submissions to free seo friendly directories. Some clients want to get a report for where their website will be listed, and some submission services even offer this service as standard. IMHO it’s just a waste of time.
1) They are free directories. They are no more free after you have spent time on them or paid submission service. If you spend further time with tracking, you are increasing your costs.

2) The url of where your link will be listed is changing, and will be changing, especially in highly competitive categories like real estate or mortgage, due to pagination. So that in 10-30% of the cases, maybe more, you will get a false “no backlink” message, while in fact your are listed, just that it’s on the page no. 2 and up of that particular category.

The only sound reason for submission tracking to me would be if you are new to submitting to free directories, and you want to find out what’s the approximate approval rate, ie. to confirm for yourself whether the efforts or money spent are worth it.

Qlweb is a Polish webdirectory and directory script of the same name. Unfortunately, there are no no English instructions. Backend interface is in Polish at the moment, though the author wrote he plans German and English translations. Frontend can be configured in English, it is rather easy, but there is no mention of how in docs, you are on your own to figure out (basically just change to language file value from PL to EN one in one of the config files). Version 2.8.7 is reviewed here, latest release at the time of writing.

Implementation example: Hotel Web Directory

Features:

Categories: It seems to me it has only one level of subcategories, ie. you can only have:
main page->category->subcategory. You can’t have further subcategory of that subcategory. What other scripts miss: qlweb will import list of categories easily. Cool!

Google sitemap support

Frontend: user submits url, script grabs meta information, but user can rewrite with own description and keywords.

Easy to add new pages to the category, for example Contact, About, few articles, or whatever else…..

Probably easy to do templates (css, and few simple files). Comes with three ready templates.
Voting. Cool mod_rewrite/seo friendly url’s. Auto approval of categories and links. Captcha. Last added websites. Easy banning. Sorting. Pagerank import. Caching.

Drawbacks:

Free version, requires you to keep two sitewide links to author.

Doesn’t support paid nor featured links.

Usable for English speaking admins only after Polish admin interface is translated (Shall be not too hard. Might happen that I will have to do it myself.)

Qlweb is easy to administer, simple backend interface, and I really love the way it produces the SEO friendly url’s, and the banning feature. There are some commercial scripts that could learn a thing or two from Qlweb. If development will continue and the English verison will see the light, Qlweb will definitely find it’s place in webmaster’s arsenal.

I have always enjoyed Dan’s insightful comments on directories, seo and marketing, and admired his writing style on his other sites, so finding out his freshly started SEO friendly blog was a good news. Though so far it seems it will be mostly technical one (there is even no welcome, no hello world, starting right out with the list updates) , dealing with aspects of updates to his famous list of directories, I’m sure there will be some valuable tidbit of information posted every now and then. In my book, this is one of those hidden secret places (it will not even be promoted probably, just being a small slightly hidden corner of his site) that you might want to bookmark right now or subscribe to the rss feed.

I remember the Barracuda script, back in the old times (well… maybe just a year or two ago), before Boonex bought it out. It was probably the first one I tried (afer Boonex took over), the one I liked, but somehow couldn’t get it run. The support was nonexistant, upgrading painful, and generally….something that only worked for advanced php admins and webmasters that are able to make a patch here and investigate an issue there and fix it all on their own.

Received a note about their new 2.0 version few days ago. There wasn’t a simple thing there that would persuade me. Script is no more free, support is $50 per month, and who knows whether the bugs were fixed or not. If not, $50 per month is probably still cheap.

Whatever I said above, Barracuda is still worth trying out. Maybe it will work for you. Nowadays, there are so many free scripts of comparable capabilities that any paid-for one must be significantly better. I’m not the one going to pay for it to test this one, but if someone got any experience, don’t hesitate to comment.

Now be prepared for a surprise…..

Who occupies or owns your directory? Who is the most frequent submitter?

Here is an sql snippet that will reveal most frequent submitters by their IP address, if run from phpMyAdmin interface:

SELECT IPADDRESS, COUNT( * ) AS “frequency”
FROM PLD_LINK
GROUP BY IPADDRESS
ORDER BY `frequency` DESC
LIMIT 0 , 30

Now that was rather easy, even for such kind of a copy-paste coder as myself, wasn’t it? Similarly you can make queries for most frequently used email address, check duplicate url’s, and more…