Directory Critic

The following is an announcement from Nima Directory:

Nima Directory – Our best directory yet

We started Nima Website Directory in May 2007 as our fifth directory attempt. We had learned much about directories from previous experiences and applied all of our knowledge in Nima Directory. It is our best design yet, our most promoted directory, includes many modifications, and our traffic is growing daily.

Nima Directory’s most important mods include deep Link for both regular (2 deep links) and featured listings (5 deep links), SEO friendly detail pages, Directory Sitemap, Live Statistics, Link Popularity mod, and more.

We also offer many uniquely designed validated coded free phpLD templates and phpLB templates that you can use in your new directory. Most of them are available in the templates section of Directory Critic as well.

Our current rates are $12.95 for regular submission and $39.99 for featured submission. We review all submissions in less than 24 hours. Please read the submission guide before submitting. However, if you submit your website as a featured listing and for some reason it is not accepted, your payment will be refunded in full.

Please feel free to contact us for any further information.

Regards,
Nima Directory

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Disclosure: The above announcement was paid. If you would like us to announce your blog or webmaster tool see our advertising page.

We’ve just launched a new forum here at Directory Critic!

Our new forum is place for webmasters and directory owners to network, ask questions, share information and promote their sites and services.

To kick things off we’re giving away 100 listings in our Webmasters Directory and 100 listings in our WebGuide. For details on how to get your hands on some free listings just check out this thread on the forum.

We’ll also be running more competitions in coming weeks for our new forum members so get involved!

See you there!

Now is an excellent time to submit your site to Best Of The Web (BOTW). If you submit your site now you’ll get 15% off the submission price and the chance to win 10k.

Best Of The Web is the oldest directory on the web and on my “must submit” list for all my new sites. It’s the easiest way to get an authority backlink for a new site. If you asked me to tell you the best 3 directories on the web BOTW would be on my list.

If you’re not keen to pay the submission price, you can get 2 months advertising for free. The links go at the top of the category page (like featured links) and the right category could send you quite a bit of traffic as well as some link juice.

$10,000 prize/15% off coupon code:

WIN10K

You must enter this when you submit your site to get the discount and enter the draw.

To submit your site head to Best Of The Web, select the right category and follow the submission instructions.

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!

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 🙂

I have just run the new version of the PR update script through the entire directory list so all the PR values should be correct now. If anyone finds any that are not, please report the directory and I’ll fix it manually. Thanks to the people who commented on here to let me know about the staggered update!

A new site has just opened that offer directory owners some free promotion and links for new directories. This is a free service, so I encourage you to take advantage! The site is Directory Release.

On another note, just a messge to spammers who submit rubbish non-directory spam sites to Directory Critic: It only takes me 1 second to hit the delete button. I check every site before it appears on the site, so you may as well not waste your time.

I received an email this morning about a serious security flaw in phpLD 2.x. The flaw allows webmasters to submit html tags in the description and name fields. The problem is easily fixed using php’s strip_tags() function. Here is the fix, courtesy of After 5 Web Design:

1. Open:
   submit.php
2. Find:
   $data[‘LAST_CHECKED’] = gmdate(‘Y-m-d H:i:s’);
   $data[‘DATE_ADDED’] = gmdate(‘Y-m-d H:i:s’);
   $data[‘DATE_MODIFIED’] = gmdate(‘Y-m-d H:i:s’);
3. Add:
   $data[‘DESCRIPTION’] = strip_tags($data[‘DESCRIPTION’]);
   $data[‘TITLE’] = strip_tags($data[‘TITLE’]);
   $data[‘OWNER_NAME’] = strip_tags($data[‘OWNER_NAME’]);

Simple. Now that this is out in the open, you should expect spammers to try and expolit it. So I suggest you patch this up as soon as possible. I know Tim from After 5 Web Design has notified the phpLD team, and a patch should be out soon.

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!

Ryan from Niche Listings contacted me yesterday to let me know that he is selling his directory. Niche Listings is one of the leading directories I have listed on Directory Critic. The auction is taking place in this thread over at DigitalPoint. If you’re in the market for a well established and profitable directory I suggest you sheck this one out.

In other news, I am in the process of moving house and have only just been able to get back online. I’m connected to the internet at a whopping 46.2kbps while I wait for ADSL2+ to get installed. It’s killing me! So, I have just finished the 120 directory updates I had waiting and will try to get through the 50 or so new directory suggestions within the next day or two. I’m way behind, but should be back in the swing of things by the weekend!