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.