zindexica blog…

As of May 2011, Zindexica now accepts articles. We decided we wanted to add some quality content to the site and let the public submit their stuff. Now, there are rules to follow as we don’t accept everything. Also, articles are by paid submission only. We only want quality articles and without a price tag, chances are we will get a lot of garbage. We still accept free link submissions if you are all about FREE!

We offer full refund to rejected articles, so might as well give it a shot!  http://www.zindexica.com/

Staff

General

Operating a good web directory is hard work. Any joker can start one, but making it useful and clean and keeping out the riff-raff is challenging. The easy way to stop the madness is to force a payment for any submission. Directory spammers do not like to pay for anything, so they won’t bother submitting even for $1. But neither will many other decent website owners who are just looking for a free link.

So, one is forced to offer free links. But, that does not necessarily mean a wild free-for-all. No, no, no; it must be kept reasonably clean and useful if one wants to make it last. So Zindexica offers free submissions, but they are treated differently. Namely, the requirements for approval are much stricter. In otherwords, we accept and publish free links but they have to be really good and useful sites, and the submission has to be written very well. All standards are strictly applied. This eliminates about 90% of all submissions. Not because we are mean, rather, most free submissions are poorly written or the website they are promoting is junk.

For serious businesses, our Express Review is the right way to go. The main difference is we will actually correct submission wording and poor grammar. We do not reject listings purely on the way they are submitted… within reason. You can’t submit total non-sense, but poor capitalization, poor description, poor title all will be modified to fit the cleanness required. The site itself has to be good, useful and not a junk or fake website. Those will still be rejected. But, with our editorial help, a decent website has a really good chance of acceptance. For rejected sites, we will refund the money.

Express review is fast, easy and gives your site a much better chance of getting that backlink. Try it today!

General

Zindexica.com will no longer accept ANY submission from websites who fail to provide verifiable email, phone, and mailing address on the website.

The reason is simple: Real businesses and organizations have email, phone and a mailing address. Fake businesses don’t. Some websites may be real businesses but are completely ignorant to the fact that not providing email, phone and mailing address makes you look fake.

So, a few legit ones may get tossed aside. Boo hoo.

Websites that exist just to post ads for other websites; websites that are merely satellite sites for the main site and offer no worthy content; or other website/ SEO scams and ploys usually don’t provide all the contact info. Especially a phone number and mailing address.

So, the decision has been made. If your site does not have an email verified, a phone number we can dial… an we will, AND a mailing address, you ain’t gettin in.

ughh. The hard part will be cleaning out the sites already in the directory. Sorry… but its for the best!

General

We have decided to take a different approach to handling free submissions. They need to be perfect.

When a directory accepts free links it is usually asking for trouble. If, of course, the owners are serious about creating a lasting, high-quality directory. What distinguishes the high-quality directories from the low-quality ones are the people running the show and their standards. If a directory basically approves everything submitted, its a trash site and not worth anything. On the other hand, if the editors are very selective it will eventually translate into high-quality authoritative directory.

So how does one create such a directory with little or no reputation? Patience is key. It will take a long time to get noticed and build up a real reputation. So to make that reputation strong, one has to set solid and very restrictive rules for approval. Offering free submissions can really make this hard.

With free submissions the submitter has nothing at stake really. They are asking something for nothing. They want a link to their site, but they are not willing to trade anything for it. Its a one-sided bargain. Basic business should tell you that this is not a beneficial trade. So how to make this more balanced in terms of trade?

The answer is tricky, but obvious. You make the free submissions difficult to get approved. They have to be perfect in every way. The details must be written perfectly according to high standards. The site itself must be useful and legitimate as far as one can tell.  If these quality standards aren’t met, then the link is rejected. No reason given, no apology. Some submitters may get offended that you rejected their site, but so what! They were asking for something for nothing. They didn’t offer you anything, but want to complain that they didn’t get their free thing… namely, the backlink to their website.

By doing this high-standard approach what you are really doing is creating a beneficial trade instead of a detrimental trade. Accepting large numbers of low-quality websites into your directory for no cost is a poor business model as it serves no purpose. What is there to gain from that? Ad-Sense clicks? email addresses to spam? These are not legitimate reasons to open a link-farm. Its short-term, poor business thinking.

If you want your directory to be a long term business project, then you have to create beneficial trades. Trades that benefit both sides of the deal. How can this be done with a free link? It is accomplished by raising the quality of the links you will accept so that your directory becomes very high quality in its content. It will stand out from the free-for-all link farms or even the lesser directories that are not quite as bad as the link-farms. What this will do, eventually, is make your directory useful to people searching for websites, not just search engines. The reputation will build and search engine companies will take notice. As well, many advocates of high-quality resources on the web will take notice and start linking back to your site because they believe that it has real value.

Demand to be in such a directory will greatly increase. Real people-traffic visiting your site will greatly increase. Now you are in a position to get real advertising income from advertisers who really want to be on your site. You can add more expensive editorial services for fast inclusion or featured websites. You can make your directory one of the small number of highly coveted places to get listed. Now is the big payback!

So, that’s what we are doing here at Zindexica.com. We are becoming even more restrictive with the free links; making it harder and harder to get it. We are also purging the directory from sites we accepted in the past, but no longer will tolerate.  We allow free links, but they have to be the perfect listing in all ways, or; it ain’t getting in.

General

Having done this for about three years, directory editing (for a real human edited directory) can be time consuming, frustrating, and down right boring. So, to be more efficient at it, you have to come up with some strategies to make the job easier.

The first thing I do is require confirmation email for all submissions. If they don’t do that, its sits in another queue waiting to get deleted. I could go and review those, but why? Let them go, it makes my job easier.

Second thing I do is scan the actual review queue for blatant problems. Poor grammar, foreign language, forbidden sites, totally wrong category, or whatever is obviously bad. I check them off, and reject them all in one click.

The third thing I do is scan the queue again, a little slower this time, looking for more subtle but still unacceptable things. I check them off and clear the queue.

Finally, I start looking at what’s left one by one and review the site. If its all good, its in. If it seems to be a good site and legit, but there is something a little off in the submission, I fix it. If the site sucks, or is just spammy crap, its rejected.

So, rejecting the obvious crap can happen pretty fast. Getting reviewed for approval takes a while longer. It seems to work ok for me.

General

Testing this new plugin I installed to see if it auto-tweets my blog posts.

… didn’t work

General

Someone quoted our 17% approval status which started a discussion that indicates that 17% approval is high.

Here’s the post

Digital Point Discussion – Directory Approval/ Rejection Rate

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1867057#post14571622

General

Here’s a tidbit that came in handy. I noticed that the admin email I get when a new link is submitted did not contain the category. I wanted to see the category because I could make a quick observation if this link was in the appropriate category, a little off, or totally off. Usually if its totally off, its spam or close to spam. If that’s the ONLY problem with the link, I usually change it to the right category. But if there are several other things wrong (and there usually are) its an easy rejection.

Anyway, I could not find how to modify the details provided in the admin email using the admin area of PHPLD. So, I googled it and after some digging I came up with the exact RIGHT way to do it.

Procedure:

Locate /include/constants.php

Open that file in an editor

look for this code its around line 67 in the 4.0 version of PHPLD

$notif_msg = array (
‘submit’ => array (
‘SUBJECT’ => ‘New link submited at {MY_SITE_URL}’,
“BODY” => “Title: {LINK_TITLE}\n” .
“URL: {LINK_URL}\n” .
“PageRank: {LINK_PAGERANK}\n” .
“Description:\n {LINK_DESCRIPTION}\n” .
“Owner Name: {LINK_OWNER_NAME}\n” .
“Owner Email: {LINK_OWNER_EMAIL}\n” .
“Reciprocal URL: {LINK_RECPR_URL}\n” .
“Reciprocal PageRank: {LINK_RECPR_PAGERANK}\n”

Wherever you want to list these items add the code for the category and the category URL so that you can quickly see and click to it from your email with these TWO lines of code.

“Category Title: {LINK_CATEGORY_TITLE}\n” .
“Category URL: {LINK_CATEGORY_URL}\n” .

(NOTE: if you put it last make sure you remove the concatenate dot (full stop, period) on the last line and put it at the end of the page_rank line.  Or, just insert these a bit higher on the list and don’t worry about it)

Original instructions were found here. Change admin email – PHPLD procedure

I did just that, and it works perfectly.

If the developers come across this post, I hope they try to incorporate a admin interface solution instead of modding include files.

General

I have a fairly good perspective on this subject since I am both an SEO service provider and a directory manager. It is well established that directory listings are a good and effective way of increasing your web presence. Both free and some paid directories can really make a big difference in your web visibility and SEO goals. However, what this really means is there is a right way of doing directory submissions and a lot of wrong ways.

If you have been doing SEO or working with web directory submissions for some time you would think that Google and the other Major search engines would just completely discount any web directory as nothing but junk links. There was a time when there were a few dozen web directories that were authoritative and trusted by the big SEs. Then there were more directories, not necessarily trusted, and then more, and more. Now there are even MORE!. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Many, if not most of which are spammy nonsense. Therefore, logic would tell you that these can’t all be good. The truth is –  MOST of these tens of thousands of directories are totally useless.

So why bother?

I thought about that too. I actually lost confidence that my directory submission plans weren’t just a waste of time and served any effective purpose. Upon further review, I was wrong. The same truth applies that was so from the beginning, namely; there are a few directories that are authoritative, respected and effective for SEO purposes. There are actually many more than there were 7 or 8 years ago. Its just they get lost in the crowd of crap directories that plague the Internet.

The key is to identify the very best, the second best, and work your way down until you have your own list of high to medium quality directories that meet the standards that a search engine like Google may consider. It may take a long time of researching and testing, but over time your list will become golden and be worth the effort.

General

Question: Does this directory use Google PR to judge a submitted website?

Yes, we use the Google PR as a basic review criterion. If a site has NO Page Rank (PR) at all, it is an indication that the site is way too new, or worse. Zero page rank (PR 0) is not the same thing as NO PR at all. So PR 0 sites will not be banned immediately. They could be rejected for other reasons.

General google, pr, review