I am amazed that no one wants to submit to a directory that has over 200 pr 4 links open. But I see people flocking to pr3 directories that look the same like flies on $%^ . The only thing that I can think of is that something must be wrong with this directory. Do not be scared to give your opioions, how else is one suppose to know what is wrong. Directory in reference is http://www.index-it.net. All comments welcome, either good or bad.
Maybe try a diferent design for the homepage. personally i think the font could look better, categories could be bigger, more spaced out, look at DMOZ for example of what i mean. And by the way, you do know you have LOTS of duplicate content there as all categories go upto page 46 even though some finish on page 1 leaving 45 pages identical.
sorry about that, maybe the PR of the site is quite enough big but the categories font are some kind microscopic. Make it a little bigger
i agree so far with what i did read above in the 2 post , you need some kind of a sweet design , font, colors , LOGO needs work, the SEO is very nice , all what you need is a nice dress for that website really , good luck with your project TvDomain
You are using times new roman (or possibly the default browser font) and it is total crap. TNR is not a screen font it is a print font. IMO TNR should never be used on a website. <rant over> The colour scheme is washed out and not at all attractivce. The content is pushed together at the top of the screen (then again I have a 21" flat screen at 1280 pixel res), but the text is just horrible You have a bar saying 'categories by topic' then below that you have categories categories categories categories categories this is really off putting, get rid of it. People are smart enough to know that anything below 'categories by topic' are categories. Make them bigger and easier to click on as already mentioned. Once your in the site, it is easy to get confused. The footer changes from that on the home page, and there is no obvious way home. I suggest you make the top banner clickable link to the home page. Have to stop now, I have work to do
I think your categories are a bit strange and many people will get confused by them. You have many specific categories but none are for general stuff like tourism, travel, etc…
Looks like you are already have a very good start. Here are my observations: I agree with previous post, expand the catagories. I like cars, and I looked for automotive within the first few seconds when I opened up your site - not there. Looks like you have room to expand on your index page. There is plenty of height left. Also, the fade out - fade in going from page to page. I don't see a advantage - its just bells and whistles. Finally your header - spruce it up a little and increase font sizes for the body.
I am shocked that we are not getting alot of feed back from the dp memebers in reference to our directory. We have over 200 pr 4 spots open on the directory, yet people seem to flock to the pr 3 directories more. Can someone help me understand what the problem is with this directory. Any feed back would be great. For the most part this is a nich directory, which means that we will not be adding any more categories. Directory in reference is http://www.index-it.net. Cost is $20.00 a year.
What niche are you targeting? It doesn't seem very well defined and I can't get a feel for it browsing your directory. Your tag line in your signature gives the impression that it would be a general directory. The description on your directory home page gives me the same impression. Your category structure does not include many of the categories I would submit to and appears to me to be poorly organized or structured. I'd be concerned with falling into Supplemental hell with the number of empty pages you have in most categories.
I like your response. And maybe you are right by saying this is not really a nich directory. When the categories were chosen we only wanted to include the ones that most people would submit to. Also I added the online business category for those that could not find a category that worked for them. As far as the empty pages go, we do not mind that, the reason for doing that was so that pr would be on every page, since most people claim that they would not submit to a site or category that has no page rank. The only reason all of pages do not have pr on them is because google based their update on a shap shot from almost 2 months ago, at that time we only had 49 pages indexed. Now all of the pages have been indexed and cached which means that although it is not visible there is pr on all of these pages. (I'm going to post a thread about this in little while) Promotion for the site is ok and we do get good traffic, we just could not justify spending money only on featured listings in other directories. The goal is have a minium page rank of 5 on all subpages which we are confident will happen on the next pr update. Therefore giving everyone a solid opportuinty to be on page that has good pr.
I think you'll also find that people won't submit to directories whose pages are listed in the Supplemental index. Having a paid inclusion model, I would look a little closer prior to submitting. 40+ identical category pages can result in dup content/supplemental filtering of the pages. What happens to your submissions when the SEs stop caching and start dropping those duplicate pages? Hint: It's easier to get new pages indexed than trying to get old pages out of the Supplemental index. You're placing too much importance on PR - you've already observed that directories with less PR than your own are getting much more attention/submissions.
point well taken. I could easily get those pages removed from the index just by removing my robots.txt file from the server. My site is being crawled and reindexed and cached all the time. And although some may have a different view of this, duplicate content only applyies to sites that have the exact same content, by changing the title tags and hr tags as well alt tags to say something different for each page then duplication becomes a non factor. Which is why the pages say something like artist 1, artist 2 etc. This method does work. I thought that some might still want a link from these pr 4 pages, after all these pages are indexed and cached, whereas I see some sites paying for listings on pages that are not cached or indexed. Just does'nt make sense to me. If these pages were pr 5, or 6's I'm sure I'd get different responses. Just My thought.
I would change the page background to a solid colour and definitely change the font to either Verdana or Tahoma - both specifically designed for viewing on the web. Adrian