If you guys do not know, I used to be very active in the Web Directory business. Back in 2006 when I entered the directory industry, some of the big names were Yahoo, BOTW, Aviva, and Romow. Recently I was asked to do a review of Romow Web Directory and their affiliate program at Balkhis. [...]

It was about a year and a half ago, I launched my directory (idk.in) which turned out to be a success when I sold it for $20,000 USD. Not long after I launched my directory, a concept of bidding directory gained alot of fame among the directory owners. One of the reasons were because it seemed to do very good for some of the bigger directory owners. Chris also known as mystikmedia, owner of the famous Alive Directory launched his first Bidding Web Directory with a name of bigweblinks.com, which got $20,136 USD from the links submitted to in on the homepage. Now, Chris was promoting his sites greatly and this site got a PR 7. Alot of directory owners took a stab at this option and thinking they will make easy money also. Well along with other web directory owners, Chris himself launched a few more of these bidding directories. But this post is not about Chris, or bidding directories. But it is about a concept behind the bidding directories which played an important role in the demise of directory industry.

While the directory industry is not dead right now because you can still make money from a general web directory. Sadly not many of these webmasters are catching the mistake and keep on making it over and over again. This mistake is Auto Approve added in the directories, or you can call it Instant Approval like Bruce of Authority Directory calls it.

This feature was introduced and made popular in the famous bidding directory script, phpLinkBid also known as phpLB. Now this is the biggest mistake of the directory industry. I am not saying that Google got angry because of the bidding directories because alot of general directories got penaltised due to their promotion techniques of buying links on other sites, but this concept itself just goes on to show that a directory is a peice of trash where everyone can throw in their links and write whatever they want.

All Directory Owners, should stay away from auto-approval. While it will save you some time, but it will cause your directory’s quality to suffer, and directories will be considered another paid links. Right now it is not because most directory owner/editors are charging for paid reviews. They review each site individually and its a review fee that the advertiser is paying them. If the site passes the criteria of the editor, then it gets included. So it is not a paid link. But by adding this method into scripts, and sites doesn’t give you any advantage but can harm you.

Eventhough I never favored bidding directories, but anyone who asked me which script to use to start a bidding directory. I said phpLD Bidding directory by the people who brought the famous phpLinkDirectory script to us. The main reason for that was because it doesn’t do auto-approve. It will let the user bid, but the editors have to approve the site and then it will appear.

Now I am keeping a close eye at the directory industry and staying in touch with some of my friends who owns directories. I still recommend people to submit their sites to directories, but not to ones which does auto-approve. If you want to know how to determine a quality web directory read my most where I set a guideline and give you a list of my favorites.

Hopefully directory owners and script developers will take this point seriously and not implement this feature in their sites/scripts.

Well this question was asked in my previous post by Pablo Savard. While it is an easy question to ask, it is a hard one to answer. I will try to do my best in explaining this because I believe many people have this question on how to determine the quality of a web directory. If you learn this, you will not waste your money with the spammy directory submission services.

Quality Content

Evaluate the content of that directory. Content includes, listing, articles, category structure, so first thing you should look for is the unique category structure. There are tons of directories out there and I can say about a third of them might have unique category structure, rest are just using the category dumps. Now you should look at the directory whether the site offers quality articles that is helpful to the users. Romow Web Directory has updated their design a few months ago and set themself aside from many others. Each category you would enter you will find related articles for the users. Last but not least, look at the quality of the listings approved. You need to visit few of their recent listings, or look at some of the sites they have approved to determine the editorial integrity. I once submitted to stpt.com and they rejected idk.in because they said the site was new, It have potential, but it is not eligible to be listed in stpt.com because my alexa was low and it was very new, so you have to check onto such things like that.

Whereas there are some sites that will approve just anyone. For example: SEO Court, this used to be one of my directory which I started in the beginning to practice and try the tricks and then I sold it to this guy. They did not change anything on the site. Didn’t update or did anything. Admin password for the directory admin panel was the same, so was the email. When I had the site, I advertised it alot, so it became a popular free directory when it got its PR 4. Now I tried contacting the owner, and he didn’t reply. I just wanted to ask them to change the admin email. Then I tried to login and see whether they have changed anything, and the password and user was same. This is almost about a year ago. I went in and saw about 32k listings pending approval. Recently, I visited that site and saw it got a PR 6 on the update on homepage, but all other pages were 0. I don’t know how that happened, but cutting the long story short you will see their latest listing page. It just approves about any site. Want to see a few example? This one, one more, and another one. No if you are thinking it only had 3 bad listings, its not true. I just pointed out 3 .. There are tons more. Focus on their editorial integirty because you don’t want to be linked from a site that also link to the bad neighborhood, such as MFA sites and others.

Popularity

Look at the site’s popularity. Well if you are going to submit …[Look inside for my favorite top 15 list, and much more]

In a course of two weeks, I recieved a few emails asking me how to make money from a general web directory. Some asked is it even possible to make money with a General Web Directory? I don’t know why I was being asked so many questions like that until I realized I was getting a few hits from 2Blog.in where he called me a Guru of Directories. I saw this post a while back but that was the one that came in my mind when I wondered about that. Therefore, I decided to write my thoughts about this issue as well as some of the other well known directory owners in the industry.

I believe that it is possible to make money with a general web directory, but those QBC Directories (yes I know the term is overrated) doesn’t stand a chance in making good money as they used to. I would like to start out with the quotes and then present my own view in details.

I asked Mikey of Zorg-Directory the question which is stated in the title.

Mikey Replied:

Yes. It requires a lot of time and effort though. Money can help a lot but is not totally necessary.

I didn’t just want to rely on source therefore I also asked Bruce of Authority Directory

Bruce Replied:

Yes I think general directories can make money, but the directory owner needs to be patient. The directory has to be properly promoted, maintained and allowed to mature. It is not a way to get rich quick.

I also asked Brian of Seo Web Directory

Brian replied:

You can but it’s harder than it used to be. I noticed a drop in submissions since Google reduced PR, seems like people are losing confidents in general web directories. As you know there is more benefits to directory submission than PR. I feel that the way forward is niche directories.

Ok people we know what is going on with Google. Directories used to sell alot of links because people were abusing the resource and was trying to manipulate PR. Which made directory owners greedy and buy links to increase their Pagerank, so they can make ten fold of their investments. Which kinda didn’t work as we can see. Alot of people think it was not good for directories, but I think it was actually better for the industry. Now we will not have any more crappy directories.

How can you not make a crappy directory and still make money. Well first of all…[This post is too long, read it and you will definately learn something]

Alright Directory owners, after a long time I am writing some tutorial for directory owners and It feels great. For those who are wondering what a category Icon mod is, It is a mod that allows the user to display unique icons next to main categories on the homepage. A display of that can be seen at my template called Areebu Theme. This is available for Download in my freebies section.

Let me begin with where I got the Idea to work on this mod. There was a thread started on Digitalpoint forum by a member asking for the category icon mod. Shabu, aka Vegabond on the forum replied with a link to phpLD Forum thread which contains the codes.

Now all I did was use the smarty tags to show the images for only the homepage categories and show a default icon for the rest of the subcategories. To do this method you will have to get the category ID for all your main categories. You can find it by simply logging into your Directory Admin Panel, and than going to the categories section.

Simply look for the categories that have Top tag for their parent id, and bring your mouse over. Look in your status bar, and it will show the Cat ID.

Now download any .png Icon at the size you desire but make sure that all of those have same size. I prefer 48 x 48 px, and also for your sub categories in inner pages pick an icon with the dimensions of 16×16 px and name icon.png

Say you have 16 top categories, so get 16 icons and name them each according to their category.

So for example the icon for Art’s name will be 1.png

Upload them to your template’s image folder. Then open main.tpl

Locate:

 <a href="{$smarty.const.DOC_ROOT}/{$cat.CACHE_URL|escape}" title="{$cat.TITLE|escape}">{$cat.TITLE|escape}</a>{if $smarty.const.CATS_COUNT} <span class="count">({$cat.COUNT})</span>{/if}

Replace it with:

 {if $category.ID eq 0}<img src="{$smarty.const.FULL_TEMPLATE_PATH}/images/{$cat.ID}.png" border="0" alt="{$cat.TITLE}" align="left" style="margin-right: 10px; margin-top: 5px; margin-bottom: 5px;" />
{else}

<img src="{$smarty.const.FULL_TEMPLATE_PATH}/images/icon.png" border="0" alt="" style="margin-right: 2px;" />{/if}<a href="{$smarty.const.DOC_ROOT}/{$cat.CACHE_URL|escape}" title="{$cat.TITLE|escape}">{$cat.TITLE|escape}</a>{if $smarty.const.CATS_COUNT} <span class="count">({$cat.COUNT})</span>{/if}

This code will add unique icons next to appropriate main categories, and add a default icon to all the subcategories in the inner page.

This mod does require some work, but It is worth it. If you are not willing to work and don’t want the hassle. Rob aka An0n have a better version of this mod because his version have a backend also, so all of the main.tpl stuff can easily be modified through admin panel. He also offers very good customer service support, so If you have the cash and no time, than I will definately recommend him.

I hope this helped alot of those who were eagerly wanting this mod.

Show me some support and digg this topic as well as add it in other social bookmarks.