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!

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