Directory Critic

I recieved a number of emails over the past few days about the ratings system being down. I have since fixed this problem, and all is working well. The fault was with the new backend I installed for the ratings system on Monday. Thanks for your patience.

For the past few weeks I’ve been looking for a way to show our visitors just how up-to-date we keep the lists here at Directory Critic. So now we have opened up our list logs so you can see exactly what additions, deletions and updates are being made to all the lists on this site.

New – List Logs

You can access this page of the home page of the site, there is a small link in the bottom right hand corner of the site statistics table. You can see from the logs that we’re making about 30-50 changes to the list every day. This includes new directory additions, directory details updates, deletion of directories and switches from free to paid etc.

I just approved a bunch of new directories which takes the web directory list to 2000! This is a huge milestone for this. A huge thanks goes out to Manish who has been helping me with the list for about the past 8 months!

In other news, I have added a directory list logs page which shows the last 500 additions or changes made to our lists. Basically I wanted a way to demonstrate just how up-to-date the lists are and how many changes I am making on a daily basis.

I am after some ideas for more SEO tools. I currently have the backlink and indexed pages checker up but I want to make a whole section for it. What would you like to see there and what would be useful to you? Any suggestions please leave in the comments, thanks.

Today Directory Critic received with 1000th verified webmaster rating! It’s great to see that so many webmasters and directory owners are using the ratings system! More directory owners are putting our buttons on their submit page and putting links to their rating page in their confirmation emails. This is getting them ratings and pushing them to the top of the directory lists.

With the 1000 verified ratings, there’s probably about another 800 or so which were unverified or broke the rules of the system. We’re watching the system daily, so don’t try to cheat it…we’ll catch you 😉

The lists will break the 2000 mark this week…another milestone for this site!

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be adding some link and SEO tools to Directory Critic. The first tool I’ve added is the backlink and indexed pages checker. This is a simple tool that shows you how many pages your site has indexed and how many incoming links it has in the 3 major search engines.

Enjoy!

I was pleased to see that Directory Critic copped a good review by the team at Site Review Blog. It seems whoever wrote the review has been using this site and had some good experiences. I like the comment about “modern design”, lol, I can’t design to save my life! Well, I guess it’s functional and works.

In other news, this week the lists will hit the 1800 mark! w00t w00t! I think it will pass the 2k mark by the end of next month.

I was pretty shocked when I got asked for an interview, why would someone want to interview me?? Well the owner of DirectoriesForum.com approached me yesterday and asked for an interview so I said why not. You can read the interview here. Nothing exciting to read I assure you, but if you’re bored…

Nothing else much to report on the site lately…thanks again to all the webmasters who’ve been using the report function to report directory changes to me. I’ve been making about 10-20 updates a day, which is excellent as it keeps the lists up-to-date.

One more thing…if you’ve been living in a cave for the past week and havent read this article about building links I really suggest you do. I just had to get on the bandwagon and give this article some blogosphere love because it deserves it!

Over the past two weeks a few directories have been trying to manipulate the ratings system on Directory Critic. This included giving away listings for ratings, getting their friends to give inaccurate ratings and hiring people to rate. To try and put a stop to this I have added a new field to the rate form which the user must enter the name of the site that they submitted to the directory so I can check it is actually listed in there if necessary.

I know this will not fix the problem all together, but it’s just another step on trying to keep the ratings system on this site as fair and accurate as possible.

A note for directory owners, it’s very easy to tell from my admin control panel if ratings are being faked. Don’t even try it, I will catch you and ban you from the lists. If you want people to rate your directory, add a lilnk in your confirmation email or add a button to your site.

Let’s keep the system fair for everyone 🙂

In other news, we’re still adding about 50 new directories to the lists every week. Make sure you keep an eye out on the new directories page for recent additions. If you own a directory, click here to submit it for approval.

This is just a note to ask people to stop emailing me about changing their directory PR. I know many directories have changed and as soon as I’m sure google has finished updating I will run my script to update all directories at the same time.

Thanks 🙂

Well, last night I added my 1300th web directory to this site! I also added a few more article directories bringing the total up to 349. Big thanks to manish for helping me with finiding new directories for the list.

Also, thanks to all the people that have been using the report link to report changes in the directories in the lists. This really helps in keeping the lists up-to-date.