Ehh, people searching Google for "powered by pld" aren't end users or quality website owners (usually) my bet is that they are either other directory owners or are mass submitters. Nah, I have always had a toe or two in the directory waters, I sold my first and only directory about a year ago, and am trying to get back in the game.
Thanks for the encouragement In my first post I give the answer regarding .htaccess. It isn't about the extension to me
If you can handle the extra time you need to keep it updated, it might be well worth the effort on the long term! Well done, to my expeience, the static pages will rank better with good pure on-page optimization and you'll need less inbound links for the same rankings!
As far as I know, SEs apply the same ranking factor to real static pages as they do to pseudo static pages, but it's cant hurt to hope, right?
I think that if you have the time to make a 100% static html directory then go for it. It will surely not hurt anything, plus I think you will feel a little better about what you have created knowing that it was done from scratch. That is how I feel about index-it.net which is 100% html static. But I also think that if you want to make things a little easier and at the same time take advantage of the html extentions then I would go with an0n's suggestion. I also own keyword-pages.com which is run off the indexu directory script but all categories are in html format. That might be the best way for you to go depending on how much time you have.
Ya, mine has been static since day one... And always will be... You can't say I don't actually work for my submission fees as I do it all manually. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh... Just like the "old" days...
Sorry I disagree, in theory you are right, the same rules/alog for both kind of sites. I think the difference results in bot crawling "habits" and the fact that the bots seldomly can parse the "same" page/content again.