They serve a purpose all right - gaming PR and trading links. Other than that, I'm honestly struggling to see what they offer to end users. If someone can sum up, in less than one sentence, what directories offer to end users, I'll eat my hat. edit - by sum it up, i mean in a positive light for directories, as i know it simply cant be done. Theres no real reason for them to exist.
Of course there is. A directory master needs to specialise in one field, draw niche traffic and share it with all the other sites that support the resource by paying review fees.
Zorg Links is not ranking for the name so apparently the site has been penalized... This is not a good sign for "general directory" owners...
Directories exist to direct their users to the information or resources they require at that point in time.
I won't argue that there ARE thousands of directories that are close to worthless. But, a directory that offers a webmaster targeted traffic has some value. Granted it's not going to deliver tons of clicks and orders, but there is value. My directory, for example, receives about 400 u/vs a day. Chances are these are ALL FIRST-TIME visitors. When this first time visitor drills down into categories (i.e. topics) of particular interest to them there IS value in being there to exploit that moment. This 'moment' is particularly important in the case of B2B (business-to-business) and to have this exposure permanently for 10 bucks is probably a smart investment. Worst case you get a backlink. Best case you pick up a new business partner. I wrote about this here: The Hidden Value of Directory Listings. Having said that... I understand your argument, but it's a little like saying that there's only room for one large business to perform each task we in society want performed. Nearly every industry has hundreds of competitors fighting it out and these include gigantic companies (Google, Coke, Digital Point) and small businesses (BigGuide, Mary's WV Soda Pop, NedsWebTown).
my 2 cents worth ... general directories are gonna have a very tough time now and in the future. niche directories will do well. but as a business model for webmasters it just got a lot less atractive.
I do believe that, its the basis on which i came into this market. I could tell you more, but I am not inclined to The present directory landscape appears to be passing , who is to say what comes next, It was brought into existense by one patron, who it would appear, is with drawing its patronage,
We are combining the two, helping the directory master to generate a revenue and retaining the branding rights so that when the general directoy becomes recognised as being part of site that serves a niche market we can recoup our investment which is minimal. Just an idea but enjoy munching your way through that hat of yours.
Google Has Been Banned the URl zorg-links.com ,and the directory can't get any Pagerank From Google Anyway
i keep a couple of generic directories to simply keep a track of which are the hot topics that people are promoting ....
I think all you have to do mikey is this http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=zorg-links.com&meta= and http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_checker?domain=zorg-links.com Does this help?
Sure looks that way, could it be a temporary glitch or something? Edit: Hate to tell you this but it looks like inner pages are hit as well. http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_checker?domain=zorg-links.com/advertisement/ Not sure how reliable that tool is though.?
I made a serious mess of things. I never got hit with the same "penalty" that others did, I think my problems are my own. Only time can sort this out, google is happy to leave it ages...
Yours is far worse mikey and I feel for you, I just hope everything goes well for you. Why not write to them and ask what they think you've done wrong. Good luck, as you know I don't like bidding directories but still wouldn't wish this on anyone as there are a few genuine people out there who've opened these up and I class you as one of them.
Thanks. I know what I have done wrong. I never got hit with the same "penalty" as the others did, mine was my own fault. I added some sub-folders with phpLB in them, to demonstrate my free phpLB themes. I didnt block them from robots.txt at the time, and as google loved my site in a few hours they got indexed. About a week later around the time others reported to have been hit, I had too. But as you can see, my "penalty" is much worse to others. I was originally not going to disclose this, but people may aswell know, i'd rather be upfront. Check the cache dates of my inner pages. They last got cached around the time that i added those demo themes. I google webmaster tools, it says google last crawled your site some time over a month ago. In awstats, googlebot has hardly visited. These are many signs of a real google penalty, not like what the others have. Its due to duplicate content - by not blocking those demo themes in robots.txt, it looked like i was using an algorithm to duplicate my site and spam googles index. Thats why google doesnt visit much any more, thats why my pages dont get cached. Although i still cant explain why the homepage is not there. Only time can sort this. I have blocked google and will have to wait a long time for them to de-index me, then i can resubmi and perhaps give that re-inclusion request a go. Im in it for the long run, those who paid will remain, as in a year time all should be fine. Those who bidded high for traffic will be fine, with all these google problems i still get better traffic than all those who arnt banned in google. Im gaining strength elsewhere anyway, backlinks grow around 10-20k a week, over 120,000 in yahoo now. It just takes time which is a shame, as im a very impatient person.