Directory Spy

The following article was written by the chap at PortProphecy on the Digital Point Forums. He has kindly given me permission to re-post the information for my readers!

It’s a good reference for directory owners and directory submitters. If you receive lots of rejections when submitting, take note!

I hope you enjoy it, its an interesting read.

Many directory owners complain of the enormous amount of crap that gets submitted to them, and in some case decent sites submitted but with very bad titles and descriptions increasing the workload on editors. Certainly the biggest contributor to these big workloads for directories is auto-submitters.

I have recently seen some new directory owners inquiring how you know if a site was submitting using auto-submitter software, and directory submitters inquiring on wherther they should use auto-submitters.

Well, I have been in the directory business for a little bit now and have gotten very good spotting the auto-submitters. The following are a few signs that a submission was auto-submitted.

Rejected Screenshot 1

The above site is the usual auto-submitted c**p. The crazy looking title and the description which is nothing but keywords give it away. Auto-submitters often just grab meta tag information for title and description, thus giving you the kind of submission as above. Site was never even reviewed. I just insta-delete. If you can’t take time to submit the right way, I won’t take time to review you. NEXT:

Rejected Screenshot 2

OK. This one is a little sneakier because the title, although certainly keyword-stuffed, doesn’t look so bad as my first example. And the description is an actual sentence! But a quick check of the site reveals both the title and description are ripped from the site’s meta tags. Delete!

Rejected Screenshot 3

Next, we have another glaring sign that someone is not using the legit method of submitting. I have my directory set to not accept submissions to the top category. How in the world did this idiot get submitted to the top?

Any sites getting submitted to the Top cat get instantly deleted/banned, and I always check the name/email to make sure I find other sites they submitted to delete/ban.

Rejected Screenshot 4

The above site may or may not have been auto-submitted, but the user decided he didn’t need to give me a description. Insta-delete. For paid submissions I will take the time to clean up titles and add descriptions, but I will NOT take time to write a description for a free submission.

If you won’t take a minute to write a good description, I won’t take but a second to delete your site and move on.

Rejected Screenshot 5

The above site may or may not have been auto-submitted, but the submitter certainly did not read my guidelines. Like so many others, I do not allow sub-domains or internal pages for free submissions (due to being overwhelmed by spammers). No need to even view his site. Insta-delete.

Rejected Screenshot 6

Again, the above site may or may not have been auto-submitted, but the submitter certainly did not read my guidelines. English sites only. Clearly this isn’t English. No need to even view his site. Insta-delete.

Free submissions are a pain and I end up rejecting 90% of them (Almost no one does the kind of things shown above in paid listings). But eventually you get good at spotting the culprit sites, thus saving time to move on to reviewing sites that do the right the thing and deserve a listing.

I recently created a new directory (Moon Directory), and I am already on the queue to be included on the VileSilencer List.

I was spending my time collecting newly created directories advertised on Solicitations and Announcements at the Digital Point Forums. However, I have found that it is easier to just watch the list at VileSilencer, since these directories are known to be SEO friendly. The queue list is updated every few days, so its worth looking at.

As I have said before, getting on the VileSilencer list is a good way to get plenty of submissions, particularly if you run a free directory. The VileSilencer lists are used by a large number of directory submitters.

Here are a few tips for making sure your directory is popular:

• Make sure there is a free submission option. You will get free publicity with people sharing lists of free directories. Unless your directory has a high Google page rank, then it is unlikely that a paid for directory will get free publicity.
• Do not use nofollow tags in your links. Some directories provide this as an option. I suggest you disable it. Search engines that respect those tags (such as Google) will not follow links that are tagged with nofollow.
• Approve links quickly. You will then get further submissions from people who have already submitted links.
• Be fair with rejections. All directory owners will reject links, just make sure that you adhere to your own rules, and explain why a link might have been rejected where possible.

The above rules are fair easy to follow, but will do wonders for your directory’s reputation!

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!