How to promote a Niche directory and avoide non niche submissions

Hello,

I have few directories that are relevant to certain states of US. My problem is, of all the submission recd in a day 99% are not related to the niche directory.

Just wondering, how do I promote my directory so that I get relevant submissions and am able to avoid non niche submissions.

Any suggestion and best practice will be highly appreciated.

Thanks

 

Hello NeoGen,

I think this is a good question but i dont know the answer. Let me know if you find a way to do this..

I am planning to open some niche directories myself too.. My idea was to close the submission and sell only advertisement space since i am mainly targetted to satisfy the users and earn from adsense..

Thanks.

 

I don't think it's your promotion. The problem is all the automatic submissions. Some people (not all) are spamming any directory that has a submit page. Its a real problem.

 

Few of these directories have good PR and are listed in Dmoz, and submission is free. Perhaps thats the reason people are just spamming. One of the solution that I am thinking is to remove free submission option. But that will hurt genuine submissions. At times its like a pain.

 

I've had major issues in the last couple of months with my niche webmaster directory voisd.com - the amount of unrelated and spammy submissions i was getting was more than the quality related submissions i was getting. My solution (owing to the fact my directory has a good PR) was to change submission type to paid and only allow free submissions if a return link is provided. Needless to say unrelated submissions stopped.

 

you can't really avoid non niche submissions, they will happen whatever you do.

 

I'm not entirely sure but you could probably mod the submissions page to query if the user had a blank User-agent name on submit to recognise that the user submission was not human made and thus create an error to stop this.

In theory its possible, may attempt it with some help from my coding mates from work...will see.

 

That would be awesome.

 

Yeah, but there are also ways to slow down the bots with scripts which tracks visitor behavior, for visitors that are trying to download too many pages too fast are soon stopped with a 503 and a penalty time before they can load more pages. This would also cut down bandwidth that all those bots would use also.