The Suggest Category mod for phpLinkDirectory allows link submitters to specify a category if one they are looking does not exist. It’s not a free mod, and you have to donate $10 to gain access to the mod section, but you get access to lots of other mods too.
It requires a tiny bit of skinning and setup to integrate it with your phpLD, but its well-worth it.
I have started a new project, which aims to create the best structure of directories for use in link directories, such as phpLinkDirectory. When there are a certain number of directories in the Category Project, I will provide a snapshot download of the current state of the categories for use in newly created directories.
So please feel free to submit as many categories as you wish!
I was thinking about a simple directory classification code, which gives you a quick insight into a what a directory is in just 2-5 letters. This saves advertising space, and allows submitters to understand characteristics of a directory at a glance.
e.g.
0 to 9 = the Google Page Rank of the directory
G = General, N = Niche
R = Need to Register, E = Express (i.e. no registration)
F = Free, P = Paid, R = Free Reciprocal link if no free link.
e.g. Ickle Directory is a paid general directory with PR4 and no registration: GEP4
A niche directory with registration and is paid, with PR2 would be: NRP2
Thoughts?
Here are a few tips for making sure your directory is popular:
The above rules are fair easy to follow, but will do wonders for your directory’s reputation!
The guy at phpLD Templates has a handful of free templates (including Brandy Wine, which is the one pictured on the left), available for phpLinkDirectory 2.0 and 3.0.
The free templates are simple and clean interfaces, but, fair credit to the guy, he’s saved his best work for the premium (paid for) templates. The premium templates cost just $15 USD each. (about £7 GBP to us Brits!)
It’s obvious from just the premium templates that this chap is getting progressively better at creating phpLD templates. These templates are very popular, so he must be doing something right! I can’t wait to see version 20!
The dirSpace directory is an established and high quality directory with a Google Page Rank of 6 on the home page, and good page rank scores on nearly all internal pages. It is clear that time and effort has gone into this directory, due to the clean and simple design. There are no adverts on this directory! It is funded purely by link submissions.
To submit a commercial listing, it costs just $6, and if the link suggestion is declined, then the fee is refunded. Interestingly, if you are submitting a non-profit website, such as a government, educational or charity site, then you can submit a link for free. It’s a refreshing change that the owner of this directory offers this concession.
In my opinion, what makes this directory novel (or rather, stand out) are the detailed descriptions for each link category. For example, if you look at the deep category of Auctions, in the Shopping category, you can see that just as much time has been devoted to writing a quality description as for the upper category. This is a subtle benefit when it comes to search engines, since there is more information relating to your link on the same page as your link. This therefore associates additional information with your link other than just the category name (as is the case with most other web directories)!
For just $6, it’s definitely worth submitting a link. You have nothing to lose, as your fee is refunded if the link is rejected. If your link is accepted, you’ll get listed on an internal page with good page rank!
If you’re looking for a clean and attractive template for your phpLinkDirectory, then I recommend the Real Blue Template by RealWD.
It’s completely free to use, as long as you maintain a backlink to their website. It also has support for both V2.0 and V3.05 of the infamous and popular phpLinkDirectory. You can see it action on their demo directory.
The 50 Pages Website is a novel approach to running a paid directory. As the name suggests, there are 50 pages on this site, and they are devoted to displaying 10 links and website preview screenshots. To display a link on the home page, it costs $50, to display a link on the 2nd sequential page, it costs $49, on the 3rd, $48, and so on. All the way down to the 50th page, where it costs $1 to display a link.
Since the pages are sequential, you cannot see the 50th page until you’ve seen the 49th, which requires you to see the 48th, etc. So its an excellent concept, tempting you to purchase links from the first few pages. Craftily, there is a sitemap for the whole site, so you could get a decent Google page rank from advertising on any page. Of course, those advertising on the front page will get the best page rank. However, they did pay for it!
Currently the site is a page rank of 0, but believe that this will increase very rapidly, as it gains popularity!
Clearly, a good way of promoting your directory is submitting your details to lots of other web directories. This helps boost your backlinks and page rank, especially considering the context of a web directory exactly matches your site as another web directory!
In order to get traffic to your site, I suggest you have a look at the link directory lists that I recommend. If you manage to get onto these lists, you will get a massive jump in submitter traffic. This is because these lists are respected as good sources of quality web directories.
I’ve run my free directory Ickle Directory with and without the image verification, and there are definite advantages to havings the image on the submit page. For those who don’t know what image verification is, its basically an automatically generated image containing random characters with detail that obscures the lines of the characters. This is designed to thwart automatic submission robots with basic image recognition abilities. This therefore prevents automatic submission of links to your directories from most submission robots and scripts.
Sure, image verification can be an irritation if a visitor is submitting many sites, but you do get far fewer spam submissions. As many as 100 sites a day were very low quality sites (adsense, duplicated content, etc). When I switched to image verification, this reduced to just 5-10 a day! Since my directory is a phpLinkDirectory script, this is just a matter of enabling an option.
So that’s my tip. Enable image verification!
