zindexica blog…

I think I was way off. To date there have been 1600 submissions and only 350 accepted links. Why? Mostly failure to confirm the email. Why do I insist on confirming email? It cuts down on automated submissions. How? If some linker submits his sites to hundreds of sites at one time using some software, the sites are often spamy. They also, don’t bother with confirming emails because either they use bogus email addresses, or they don’t have the time. These are generally unwanted spamy junk sites anyway. However, even if a linker is using an automated system, if they take the time to confirm the email, and the site and link info is good, that’s fine. But these are rare.

General rejected

Here’s a reciprocal link I was offered today.

http://seogaprogmr.ueuo.com/web.html

Who are you kidding? There’s like a billion links on that page! Worthless man, worthless. I rejected the link just because this reciprocal page was so insulting.

Also, the homepage has some kind of virus on it. Really nice.

Update: This guy submitted about six different sites with the same reciprocal link on the ONE page (above)! Dude… what are you doing! Shoo! Go Away.

General reciprocal links

Since I started offering reciprocal links as faster way for links to be reviewed, I have received one or two legitimate reciprocal links. All the rest have been using a deceptive practice I call “Isolated Pages”. It may be called something else, or maybe that’s what others call this practice as well… I don’t know. What I do know is that it is a deceptive practice.

How it works is simple. An offer for a reciprocal link comes to an unsuspecting webmaster. He reviews the site and the link location page for his link. It all looks fine. But wait… How can one get from the website’s main pages to the links page? The webmaster goes over several pages and finds no link to the link page. He looks at the sitemap… not there either. He looks up the site in Google to see if the links page is indexed… alas, it is not! What’s the deal here?

The deal is, the offering webmaster has created an “Isolated Page”, aka, “Island Page”. It is not connected to the rest of the site on the front end in any way. Sometimes its even blocked by the robots.txt file. Its offered up to other webmasters as a reciprocal link page, but it is completely worthless. What’s worse (or better for the trickster) is that if the link partner goes ahead and gives him the link, it actually creates a one-way link for the blackhat webmaster’s site! Pretty sneaky… huh!

That’s right, its a blackhat method. This sort of blackhat tactic is the lowest form, and makes me a little angry because, it is fooling other webmasters and website owners, not just the big bad search engines. Even some blackhats would not stoop so low, but corruption will always exist. This is why every reciprocal offer you get must be correctly reviewed. This is only one of many tricks that people use to try and get an edge. Its the same old story since the begining of recorded history. Man tends to cheat if he can get away with it. It works the same for the Internet and SEO.

General black hat, rejected

We’ll I guess its hard to get the point across. 80% of the submitted sites have ad-copy descriptions that are written for an advertisement not a directory. I could just reject them all, but some are actually good websites. I do in fact reject many especially if they are over-the-top with their superlatives and keyword repetition. But, I am now trying a little different approach. For those sites who otherwise qualify, but have written ad-copy instead of a description, I will revise the descriptions to be as plain-Jane as possible. As in, so basic and generic it looks it could describe any similar site. Why do this? Well, the description is supposed to be, well… a description… not an ad.

Here’s one example:
“The world best computer software and the cheapest prices. Find, Microsoft, Adobe, Sun, and many other top brands for the lowest cost possible.”

Revised: “Sells brand name software.”

The submitter could have made it better than that, but chose to write an over-the-top advertisement full of superlatives and claims that cannot be verified. So, they get the simplest description possible, rather than rejected. I think that’s pretty fair.

General

Although not required at all, providing a reciprocal link to Zindexica.com will get your site reviewed much faster, usually within 24 hours. As the popularity grows, this will become more and more valuable as we can only review about 20 -30 links on a good day, and some days none at all (I have a life ya’ know).

HOWEVER, providing a reciprocal link is NOT a guarantee that your site will be accepted. The same review process and rules apply. Also, we have received quite a few reciprocals lately, but almost all of them did not confirm the email. This will disqualify you just the same as a regular link submission. Making the effort to provide a reciprocal link is appreciated, but failing to confirm the email will make it useless in the end.

General directory tips, email confirmation, reciprocal links

Here is another problem:

“Hello Zindexica.com,
I use Boxbe to protect my email address. While I did receive your email about “Your Link Request at Zindexica Web Directory”, you are not currently on my email Guest List. I’ll be more likely to see your email and future messages if you are on my priority Guest List.
Click here to be put directly on my Guest List
Thank you,
XXXXX ”

In my opinion, this sort of protection software is fine for personal email, but if you are using it when submitting links to directories, you are going to have problems. I am not going to add my email to your “safe list”. I don’t have time for that. So, when doing directory submissions or general SEO correspondence of any kind, use a more conventional email. Grab a gmail, yahoo, or hotmail account just for your SEO purposes. If it starts to get spammed, just ditch it and get a new one. Most directory admins are not going to bother with this email block notice and your link won’t get accepted.

General email confirmation

The number one reason is failure to confirm the email. As noted in the previous post, if you do not confirm the email, the link does not even get reviewed at all and the system will delete the link after 24 hours. So you gotta do it.

The next most popular reason for rejection is Spammy titles and descriptions. DON”T make a keyword list for the title or the description. Make your title 2 -4 words with first-letter capitals (like any title) and have it be one important key word phrase you are working on.

Make the description objective and non-marketing language. This is known as ‘third-person active voice’. “ABC Electric provides electric parts and supplies in the Dallas Texas area.”  NOT “The best electrical parts and the lowest prices in Dallas” – this will be rejected. You are to describe the website and what the business does in plain un-emotional rehtoric.

Hope that helps!

General directory tips, email confirmation

I noticed a lot of submissions fail to confirm the email. Listen, we don’t spam anyone so your email is safe. you should use a disposable email anyway, but we require confirmation so that it cuts down on automated spamy submissions. If someone has to click on the confirmation email, the auto-bot submission will fail. It takes a real person to respond to the email, so if you want to get reviewed you MUST confirm the email.
thanks.

General email confirmation

Zindexica.com was formerly a hand built HTML only web directory. It was an experiment in directory usefulness. That is, having to do with SEO. I was seeing weather a well coded HTML only (no javascript, no PHP, no database) directory would index better than a dynamically generated directory like PHPLD. It seemed to do very well. The problem was, it was getting popular and I was receiving 40 plus submissions per day. This is good for a directory, but the headache of reviewing and adding all those links by hand. Literally cutting and pasting the separate title, decscription and URL on the right category page. Sounds simple enough, but the reality was the my time was limited, and I really don’t do well with tedious repetition. I would do about 5 links, and then go back to my real job.

After a while, my enthusiasm just fizzled out, and it became too much of a chore to maintain. I let it go, and it died out. I killed the submission forms, and let it just sit there for many months, until I finally decided to take it down completely. The results was that it did ok SEO-wise, but it was not a thorough experiment.

About 2 months ago, I got the idea to relaunch the thing, but this time I would use a well-known directory script. So I went about setting up the hosting again, and installing the software and database. I found a theme I liked and customized it. I then set up a few top-level categories and used the “spider” feature to add some initial links. I then posted an ad on digital point, and it was off to the races.

The new site is clean, and professional. I have tweeked the design about 1000 times, and have played around with the underlying features. I think it is really takeing shape now. I have received over 650 submissions in the first six weeks of the relaunch. I have only approved about 220. I am trying to be serious about only accepting legit websites with good content. I also have found that most people are lazy and don’t read the rules. They then submit rediculous link titles, and terrible descriptions. Mostly, its just promotional BS instead of an actual description. In the beginining if I liked the site, I would edit the title and descriptions until it was satisfactory. Then I realized, as things got busier, that I don’t have time for that nonsense. If folks would just read the rules, they would have a real good chance of acceptance.  So, I have been rejecting a lot. I don’t really care when people complain, its my site and the link is free, complaining won’t really help.

General