Quite a few of you have links that should go to your home page but go to the submit page. Perhaps this was by design but was disconcerting when I wanted to take another look at your main page while considering other sites I might submit. Some of you with general directories might think about adding more categories before inviting submissions. It was a surprise visit directories without a place for Cooking, Fitness, and Home Improvement. And where to submit a weblog about being a webmaster often isn’t clear. That is actually the site I care least about submitting but I figure if you solicit submissions on webmaster forums you’ll be getting plenty of them. If registration is required I just close the browser tab and move on to the next free directory (sorry, this is just a quick hit an run for me - anywhere from five to ten listings meets my needs). To those of you with slots for LGBT sites, my thanks. Richard
Hi Richard, Some very useful comments, thank you! While any one directory cannot appeal to everyone or their submission habits, it's always good to receive input. I'm not sure what you mean by registration though. Do you mean supplying a ton of personal information to the directory and it's owner? Or is the usual website name, your name, URL, email address acceptable to you? I've heard other folks say the same thing, but they are never quite clear on how much information they are willing to give up to get listed. Would you mind clarifying your comment to help us directory owners out?.. Thanks!
Thanks. I don’t want to seem as if I have some One True Way agenda to push. But from looking at the sites my impression is that the webmasters wanted to gain listings so they would have content on pages that would generate, say, AdSense income. I never have any problem giving my name and email address (Gmail does a good enough job with spam). A few directories seemed to want me to go through a formal registration process like you do with a forum. While I will do that for a very few directories, asking for more than Yahoo Directory or DMOZ does seems pushing it. Richard
I think it can be a bad move to require registration, especially when the directory is not well established, and the value of the link in that directory is not so high. I'll bet you'd register to get a link on a PR 5+ page. It's just a matter of deciding value.
I've gladly jumped through a few hoops for older directories. Honestly, I don’t worry too much about page rank (I have a phpLD that sends some sites significant traffic without any PR). Mostly I submit to directories when I’m energizing a site that I’ve let rest inert for a few months. People fret about “nofollow†but that doesn’t seem to stop Google from giving me backlinks at least at this point in time. Richard
I've never liked this, or seen the point in it. In theory you could go back and update your listing, on the off chance that you remember you had it in the first place, and you need to radically alter a description. But my view is that anybody should be able to report bad links, not just the site owner. If a site changes use, say into an adult category, the webmaster isn't exactly going to be rushing to get the listing moved and/or deleted. So registration is an unnecessary barrier. You don't need a login/password combination to get a mailing list together, so why bother?