Directory Critic

Last night, one of the hard drives on our servers failed. The result was the website going down for about 8-10 hours and some minor data lost. We restored a backup from the 13th of September so only a few days data was lost.

If you submitted your web directory after the 13th of September please resubmit it here:

http://www.directorycritic.com/add.html

If you paid for a listing, or upgraded to a premium listing please add your web directory then contact us. We will verify you made a previous payment and add your directory back to the site.

There might be a few minor glitches over the next 24 hours while we get everything back up 100%. If you find any problems throughout the site please don’t hesitate to contact us and report them.

Thanks for your patience, we’re working hard to get Directory Critic fully operational again!

I’ve been seeing a new trend for about the past 6 months or so. The trend is buying old domains with PR5, throwing up a copy of PHPLD with a free template, calling the directory a “strong PR5” directory and charging for links. These directories are dead easy to spot, just look for the unusual name coupled with a lack of quality!

I don’t recommend you spend any money at all buying links at these directories. If they accept free listings, go ahead but don’t pay! Generally, the owners of these directories are just out to make a quick buck and will not spend any time or effort on building the traffic and popularity of the directory. We’ll see the evidence at the next PR update, but I am guessing most of these domains will lose some if not all of their PR and incoming links.

I am not saying putting directories on old domains is not a good thing to do, but like with any other directory or website, the owner has to work at it. I still believe there will come a time when a lot of directories will be dropped out of the index and only the unique, well promoted directories with added features for both users and submitters will survive.

So if you’re thinking of starting a directory, be prepared to put in some work. If you look at the top directories, their owners have put many hours into promoting and building a quality site. And the results pay off, becuase webmasters will pay to have their site listed there.

Tonight the number of active and verified webmaster ratings on Directory Critic clocked over 6,000!

Thanks to all the directory owners that send their submitters to rate their directory here. It should pay off in return traffic in the long run!

🙂

To be honest, when I submit my link to most web directories I don’t expect to get any traffic at all back. I use web directories for links, not traffic, that’s it. The only directory I expect to get an decent traffic from is Yahoo! Directory. But when I was going through my stats for all my smaller sites this morning I noticed I was getting traffic from a number of directories I submitted to. So I thought I’d make a list of the directories that sent me traffic.

The amount of traffic sent by each directory varied site to site. Generally speaking, only 1 or 2 free directories sent me traffic the rest were paid placements. So, here’s the list of directories that sent me traffic:

1. Aviva Directory (send on a few sites too)
2. King Bloom
3. Best Of The Web (my 2 month free sponsor sent quite a few, as did regular listings)
4. Yahoo! (easily send the most traffic – but it’s the most expensive)
5. Directory Panel
6. Links Juice
7. DirSpace
8. Ezilon
9. Joe Ant
10. y7n Directory
11. Romow

There were a lot of other directories that did send traffic, but it was only about 1-2 visitors a month which does make the list!

If you look at the above list you’ll see a very obvious trend…they are all quality, well managed directories. Which means not only do they send a bit of traffic, but your link is actually worth something when you submit it.

If you ask me, directory link building is definately not dead. I have just become a lot more selective about the site(s) I submit my site to. My old methods were to grab every link I could get, but that’s definately changed – especially with my larger sites.

It’s easy to see who puts time, effort and money into making a solid directory. These are the directories that you want your site listed in. And for the directory owners, the time, effort and money should pay off 🙂

It’s good to see so many quality free PHPLD templates that are now available! The first free PHPLD templates made available were pretty basic, but now more designers are getting involved and the quality is keeps getting better.

I’ve noticed that the free PHPLD templates section of this site is getting more pageviews and downloads over the last month. There are now 53 free templates available and almost 2,000 downloads!

Here are some of my personal favorites from the collection:

SlyGreen – by Linksjuice
Glossary Orange – by My Green Corner
Coolwave – by PHPLD.us
Explore – by PHPLD.us
Link Gear – by Emille
Cyclone – by PHPLDTemplates.com
Alive 3.2 – by Directory Mix
SwirlMix – by All PHPLD

If you’re a designer and offer free templates, apply to have them listed here on DC. You’ll get some extra exposure and more downloads of your template.

Want to submit your website to all the new SEO Friendly, FREE, Non reciprocal directories announced at Major Webmaster forums and Directory lists like DirectoryCritic.com?

We can submit your website to all the new directories as it is announced/launched. We offer manual Directory Submission with Quality Reports. We maintain a reports in a Google spreadsheet file and share it with you.

Highlights:

• Accepting multiple anchor text links
• Accepting multiple descriptions
• Accepting multiple URLs including deep links
• On an average get links in about 200+ web directories – more than half of them will turn paid after first few months.
• This is a very cost effective way of promoting your website. Even if you get only 50 backlinks a month, that’s still only 40 cents a link!
• Live Reporting using Google Spreadsheet
• Easy payment options using paypal subscriptions
• Discount on multiple orders
• We believe in providing Quality service.

Signup for NEW DIRECTORY SUBMISSION SERVICES

To know more about this & other web services offered by Wolrd-Click.com, write to dotcompals (at) gmail.com with details of your needs. We will get back to you in the next 24 hours. For bulk orders, send query to dotcompals @ Gmail.com.

After making payment, send your site details to dotcompals @ Gmail.com in the following order:

Title (upto 5):
URL: Descriptions (upto 3):
Name for submission:
Email for submission:
Keywords:
Preferred Categories:
Paypal Email:
Email for sending reports:

Read testimonials of other webmasters / SEOs using the above service

world-click.com Directory submission packages

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Disclosure: This was a paid webmaster announcement. Directory Critic is in no way affiliated with World Click. If you would like to announce your webmaster service or directory here go to this page.

Another deal from BOTW (best of the web). This month (June) they are offering 20% of any website submitted. To get the 20% off you need to enter this code:

BEACHBUM

If you’re serious about promoting your new site, I suggest you submit as it’s an easy way to get an authority backlink!

Just a minor homepage update. A random free PHPLD template is pulled from the database on each page load and featured on the homepage. You can see an example of this by clicking here.

We now have 45 unique free PHPLD templates listed in our resources section. If you’re a template designer and want to get extra exposure for your templates, you can apply to upload your templates to us. You will get your own page with links to your website where we’ll display your templates and make them available for downloading.

There have been around 1,350 template downloads since we opened the free templates section earlier this year. Now with a templates appearing on our main page we expect to have a lot more downloads.

Any questions about this, please contact us.

With carefully screened results, The Directory Journal provides links of the highest quality along with website reviews, industry relevant news sources, articles and How to guides. It provides up-to-the-minute news on important world-wide issues, The Directory Journal brings you the information you need on the business topics you care about the most.

DirJournal is not only a directory with links but is a mini advisers to the users. Not only do you find website listings on this directory but also related news items and other articles. So, if as an user, you are looking for something then not only can DirJournal.com give you information on relevant sites but also some relevant information itself.

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The above was a paid blog announcement. If you would like to announce your directory or webmaster service on our blog please see our advertising page.

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of clone directories and directory link farms are being submitted to Directory Critic. Here’s what I class as link farms or clones:

• Loads of directories on the same IPs
• Directories that have obviously had no effort at all put into them (some don’t even have a template or don’t even have the logo changed – how hard is it?)
• Category clones (basically cloning an populated directory)

These type of directories have little to no value for the users of Directory Critic. In fact, that have no value to the internet as a whole. Many of these directories will go straight to Google’s supplemental index and never come out.

Another point to make is that if Google or other engines flag ones of these networks as a link farm and links to your site are consistent there is a chance that your site may also be flagged and it might effect your rankings.

So a notice to the people who are doing this, I know who you are, and I won’t be accepting any more of your directories. I have a script now that checks the database for other directories on the same IP, and it’s built into the directory approval process.

If anyone have any questions or problems with this email me 🙂