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| I see a web directory in your future. |
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Friday, October 26, 2007
Directories come in many shapes and sizes, some are general, while others are more topical and highly specialized. Webopedia describes a directory as the following: "(1) An organizational unit, or container, used to organize folders and files into a hierarchical structure. Directories contain bookkeeping information about files that are, figuratively speaking, beneath them in the hierarchy. You can think of a directory as a file cabinet that contains folders that contain files. Many graphical user interfaces use the term folder instead of directory." Large directories like Yahoo tend to have very generalized themes and many charge small fortunes for listings. While smaller and niche directories like 2ListNow.com and 2SearchTech.com offer free listings. The business models for some of these directories include premium listings, advertising revenue and pay-per-click advertising like Google adsense. Being listed in a directory can bring in targeted traffic, and also provides a valuable (for SEO purposes), one-way link from a relevant website. Many directories obtain high Google Page rank and strong SERP's and are therefore considered well-respected resources, and are covenanted as link partners. Some of the smaller niche directories might not supply large amounts of traffic but the traffic they do send is highly specialized and very valuable. In conclusion, directory listings should be an important part of every Webmaster or website owners game plan for achieving higher SERP's, page rank and quality visitors. About the author: J. Grant can be found approving directory submissions and offering advice over at http://www.2SearchNetwork.com SEO Best Practice: Befriend the Directories Why Directories Are Important Directories should play a major role in your SEO efforts, well, at least the big and important ones, for the following reasons: - Listings within major directories provide "context" to search engines. For example, if your web site is listed in the Open Directory Project under the category Pets -> Weird Pets -> Blue Cats, search engines will assume your web site has something to do with blue cats. Your web site and pages will be indexed faster and might have a better ranking in search results for specific terms (in this case, "blue cats"). - Major directories (such as Yahoo! Directory, ODP, Jayde etc.) have high page ranks and as long as you obtain a non-reciprocal listing from them, paid or unpaid, your page rank will benefit greatly. - Major directories are often replicated by other web sites (think of ODP, with hundreds of copies) which means that a listing somewhere in such a major directory will cause listings in all replica sites, contributing towards your link popularity efforts and boosting page ranks. - The ODP (Open Directory Project) feeds results to Google, AOL, AltaVista, Lycos, Netscape - once again, a presence in ODP can get you quite far. Submitting to Directories As with most good things in life, you need to make efforts to get into quality directories. Although detailed instructions on how to submit your web sites are always provided by the directories, there are certain aspects to consider before you start hunting for directories and submit your web sites: - Start with Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project: being listed in the two of them is worth more than being listed in all other directories together! You will find soon enough that, unfortunately, being listed in these two is the hardest thing to do: Yahoo requires a $299 annual fee for regular web sites (only non-commercial sites qualify for a free listing) and $600 for adult sites, while ODP is free but you need A LOT of luck to make your way into it. ODP is so large yet is strictly human edited, which means the waiting time for a listing can extend to even years! Make your duty as a SEO worker and submit your web site, but don't get your hopes too high, unfortunately. - Religiously follow the submission guidelines provided by directories: read them as many times as you need to make sure you will not upset its editors by submitting your site the wrong way, with inaccuracies, the wrong description style, or to the wrong category. - Try to find niche directories if your web site's content is suitable for that. For example, if your web site covers Marketing topics, focus your efforts into finding a Marketing directory and submit your site there: search engines love links from sites relevant to yours! - You will probably come across many directories with paid inclusions: use your common sense to appreciate if it's worth it or not. A good criteria is to check their Google Page Rank: if it's at least 3 levels higher than your site's Page Rank, it's probably worth spending the money for the inclusion fee. However, do look for directories with a flat, one-time fee rather than recurring monthly or annual fees: you'll end up spending less money! In the end, remember a simple rule: if it's too easy to get into a directory, it's probably not worth the effort to get into it in the first case. Why Search Engines Purging ODP Clone Websites There are lot of websites which are fully or partially clone of ODP (Open Directory Project).These websites or part section of websites, which are using ODP script to reformat the data on there site are useless and they have no original new contents. It is learnt that search engine specially Google is purging or banning such kind of sites. Why search engines are against Dmoz clone sites? Is the data in them not worthwhile or are they been misused by site owner's? We will try to find our reason, but before that let us first understand all about Dmoz Directory What is Dmoz Directory (ODP) The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory on the web. It is owned by "Time Warner" and constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors, and is truly unique in many ways. The Open Directory, also known as DMOZ (the domain name of ODP), is a large, categorized directory of websites and pages, which is staffed by volunteers. Every website and page that is added to the directory has to be manually reviewed before it is included. Since its index is manually constructed and edited, categorization and relevancy is superior to any other index of its kind and equally as unique, is the fact that this data is open and free to the public for replication. As of July 2005, ODP had about 4.6 million listings organized into over 580,000 categories derived from the contributions of some 69,000 editors. How is this free data been used to make Dmoz Clone? There are a lot of ODP scripts to make clone of the ODP. These scripts enables you to add live data of the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org to your own website using a very easy to customize template based system. Users can browse and search categories of websites. These scripts that grabs live contents of the Open Directory dynamically and formats them to make your own version of the Open Directory. These are small scripts have few files to just uploaded on your server and you can get Thousands of Dmoz directory pages on your site in your own templates design. These scripts just get live data from Dmoz.org and it has no original new contents. Does Dmoz Clone bring traffic? Webmaster do not like Dmoz clone websites as they have not original content rather have duplicate contents and no body will like to link a site or vote a site which has duplicate contents. Most people will not even browse your directory. Most people will just browse 2-10 pages of your directory, they will just leave and never come back. Why Search Engines are against Dmoz Clone? There are various reasons which are explained as: There is no Original Content which is required to make a Quality Site. Duplicate contents as all scripts extract live data from Dmoz and create thousands of similar pages on the web. The Dmoz directory has more than 580,000 categories If thousands of site will grab the live contents from Dmoz it will results into creation of millions of similar pages which is making web a junkyard of similar pages with nothing new. The Dmoz clone sites has thousands of pages created on fly with no extra hardwork and lot of spammer are using it for advertising or Google adsense program The lot of webmaster has just created a section of Dmoz to get inbound links from thousands of pages to increase link popularity and search engine ranking Text link advertiser also created Dmoz clone to sell links on thousands of pages to increase artificially link popularity of text link ads buyers. Which kind of Dmoz clone Search Engine's will Like Search engines are concerned with presenting quality results to there users If you can modify and enhance the data retrieved from Dmoz and present in unique format it will definitely be preferred by Search Engines, Webmaster and Web Surfers. Google has got its own directory for which it has got data from Dmoz but enhanced by Google technology i.e ranking of sites on each directory page by Page Rank. Using ODP Clone Scripts just to make simple odp clone will get your site banned from search engines due to duplicate contents. Therefore it is advised not to use this virtually useless script on important sites or sites that rank well on search engines. Lot of ODP Clone Scripts makers sites were banned, because too many websites with duplicate content ( as they all have Dmoz clone) were linked to them. These scripts owner require there site URL to be linked at the footer as "Powered by ..." Which results into link farming or inbound links from similar pages. Therefore if you want your site or directory to be safe and run for longer times then have original and unique contents in it which will not only make it rank but also get good traffic on your site and increase its popularity. About the Author The Article is written by Nameeta Kashyap Editor of Megri Web Directory and Team leader of Megrisoft ____________________________ Copyright information.... This article is free for reproduction but must be reproduced in its entirety, including live links & this copyright statement must be included. Visit http://www.megrisoft.com for free Internet marketing and web development articles, tutorials and tools! Webmaster Articles Index |
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