zindexica blog…

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.

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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.

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

… didn’t work

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

Maintaining a quality web directory is harder than most people realize. Even with a nice software script to help automate some things, the actual review and editing process is hard to keep up with. Uber spam submissions don’t help either.

Right now Zindexica is running a 17% approval percentage. That’s 83% rejection. Its not because its SO difficult to get approved. We do have standards and do review every single site that comes our way, but the truth is –  the main problem is –  all the spamy crap submissions. If you have ever ran you own directory you’ll know exactly what I mean. You want to publicize more and more, but it attracts more and more spamsters.

What to do? Well I have this system if skimming through the queue and looking to obvious crap. Like all Spanish words. Nothing against Spanish, its just that the editors here only speak/ read English, so we can’t really review the site… ju no maeng? Or, a list of keywords for a title, or a description that starts with, “looking for the best…” — no I’m not, thank you very much.

The system eliminates the unconfirmed emails automatically after a couple days, so that helps.  Right now I made some changes and I am working to get this thing running smooth again. So, have fun with it.

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Today I rejected a boat load of links without even looking at the site. The reason? The submitters had a list of keywords in the title or description.

The reason this is a no, no is that it looks trashy. You may have a site that covers a lot of different products or services and you may feel that to properly describe the site you need to list them all in your description, however, doing so does not help your site for SEO purposes. The description of a link is simply text on the page and will, along with the other links in that category, help aggregate a certain theme or relevance for the page. But, this will only be helpful when much of the page has similar themes, keywords, etc. One description listing everything you sell is just nonsense and serves you no purpose. What’s worse is it looks really trashy and degrades the site and your link.

To be effective with your description you should include the keyword phrase that is your title, in the description in a natural language sort of way… not a list! This particular phrase will generate “SEO Credit” being on the page in a natural way. For true optimizing, focusing links on one primary phrase is far more effective than jamming a bunch of key terms together. This is what I have found to be true in my experience an is documented throughout the Internet by other pros. Good optimization considers both search engines and human interaction for ethical, long term success.

Later…

General directory tips, key words, rejected

I thought I would change gears and write something positive for a change.

uhh. I’m still thinking.

General