I think in terms of the auto submission software its more about the number that get submitted back to back. !ask! if you submitted 20 sites at the same time using that auto software, I bet your acceptance levels would've been a lot lower, regardless of how well you followed the guidelines. I've got queues with literally 1 and 2 hundred from the same submitter all in a row. The fact that they also don't follow basic submission rules also makes it very easy to remove them, but its the fact that there are so many that they stand out. If you are getting hammered by autos and wondering how to remove them (assuming you don't have an admin panel that can search and destroy), go into phpmyadmin and run a query on their email address (assuming its the same) and just nuke the lot in one press.
Great discussion, lots of useful info, thank you. Some submission software is useful in the way that it will allow you to do the submissions manually, but have a nice list for you so you can keep track of things... I do my manual submission through web CEO sometimes, I like it because it sends me right to the submission form for the given website rather than having to navigate through the directories to find each site's submit link etc. Helps to speed up manual submission.
Portprophecy, I understand your concern for running a clean directory that will acheive results for people in the search engines. But do you at least send the people who pay you a quick little email asking to fix their meta description? My directory is new, and I have not been reviewing sites for the title and meta tags and description. Can a directory be banned in Google Yahoo or MSN if it thinks that the sites in the directory have no tags?
No I dont email them. The problem isn't fixing their meta description. The problem is, if they are using their meta description (which for most people is random keyword-stuffing that makes no grammatical sense) for their listing description in my directory, then they most likely submitted via an auto-submitter. Once you have had your directory up and running for some you will see the submissions I am talking about, submissions no human being would have submitted like that.
Any editors use scipt to pre-filter submissions? I mean, if there is lot of junk (auto-submissions) it may be worth to filter them out using script before manually editing. Does anyone use such software for keeping directories up to date?
Yes. A decent directory script should be able to filter on a number of criteria. For example, sometimes you can tell just by the domain name that a site doesn't belong in your directory. If you don't accept deeplinks, then anything with more than one slash can be automatically booted (not counting the http:// slashes, of course). If you run a regional directory for Canada, say, then you don't need to look at anything with a .cn or a .ru extension, for instance.
What I would love to have is a script that detects whether a submitted url is a blog or not. My free blog directory gets 100s of sites submitted which have absolutely not a thing to do with blogging. If all I had to do was getting rid of the splog submissions, I would save a ton of time.
@PortProphecy - was good fun reading that! Any objection if I put the content from your original post onto DirectorySpy.com? Happy to put a backlink to one of your sites and full credit to you at the end of the post. Dan
Lol you know something, one of those sites is my site... i paid someone in DP to do the submissions for me, seems like he didnt do a good job... *sigh*
That's why its so terrible. I know i can't blame the sites submitted sometimes because the quality of the site doesnt reflect its submission
Thanks! Now up on DirectorySpy.com http://www.directoryspy.com/2006/10/21/poor-directory-submissions/ DO you have a name or alias you want me to use on the post?
Derek, To quote you from back over on phpldforums: haha the feeling is mutual man. you always have some good stuff to either post about, and provide a good laugh about. It Definately helps keep things on the up and up over here Rob
i definately agree with this post portphrophecy. i used an auto submitter for article directories but my prblems were: 1. they got rejected of course. the best directories want you to hand submit AND 2. the problem with the fields being filled in incorrectly because different directories have different guidlines. almost all 44 directories I submit to maunally review your article, even if they're powered by the same software. so now i bite the bullet and take two hrs to submit 1 article to 44 directories and i get way better results. if you don't have that type of time on your hands, you can most likely get someone to do it for a lil $$.