Directory Owners seem very slow to learn how to protect their own Directory Market

Yup! every link should be judged on merit, and not on guessing whether its paid or not!

 

If you want to make a major change Pete or any other directory owners, then i would suggest not to discuss it here or on any public forum.

Get your guys together, people you trust, do it any way suitable for you all but not publicly, once you have a tight and well thought out approach then go about what it is that you want to do and what you want to change.

The moment you announce here and try to discuss and share ideas like today, then any watchers see already that you dont have a plan yet, theres nothing organised, so naturally you will get allsorts jumping into the thread to do their thing.

Be secretive if you have to, if it helps you in what you want to do, i still think the task of what you propose is unmanageably massive, but one opinion does not mean something is impossible, i say its not manageable but hopefully i could be proven wrong.

Changing peoples mindset will not begin here at DP, meanwhile stay active here as a directory owner at the directory section here, so that in the future the crazies cant go pointing the finger and asking where people disappeared to.

 

Thanks for the information concerning directories, but I think they have the future in development if will have weight among other directories.

 

Pipes, that post i see as the most important post and relates directly to the thread theme,

i ask this if on a public forum people no longer feel comfortable to discuss improving their product then it is no longer public forum for the betterment of all.

It nearky seems there are powers at play that as soon as as some one posts positive or makes sense there is out of the woodwork organised confusion.

and to even suggest that people need to go underground to help or better their product shows the tue extent that this forum has 2 choices, stand up and live or die.as it stands it is pointless

from a personal angle ( never mind can't be bothered )

 

Ok David and Goliath then

Seriously though, it wont go further than discussion here, i bet this thread turns into like the others did, go private with your discussion.

If you think you can change how people look at something regarding google then you will be wasting your time, it wont change because directories decide.

The search engine is where our sites sit, how can that be fought against?

By trying to get peoples minds off of 3rd party ratings your actually bringing more attention to them, you know most people will still deny this but they have such a tight organised system that by even complaining against the search engine it actually promotes it.

The complaint brings more attention and more conforming to it.

THey are one wealthy, organised well connected company, please dont fool yourself into thinking you can beat this.

 

@pipes - no names were ever mentioned to '3rd party' stuff, so I fail to see how any attention is being given.

 

Yeah i know what you mean and i agree that people should be able to enjoy the freedom of discussion on a public forum, im not saying my suggestion is the right thing to do.

Im all for freedom and would love to be able to say certain things and make a positive change, but the very idea that anyone could somehow take on something so big in the sense that you miraculously alter peoples way of thinking regarding ratings and at the same time educate them about web directories seems only possible to me in thought.

Have you seen what Macdonalds does when someone speaks out and tries to make a major change, they have some of their guys meet with you in a hotel room and offer you money.

A few years ago google payed out 90 million? something like that, i dont even know what for, but it was like chicken feed to them.

If a group wants to discuss tactics then you dont broadcast it over the radio, people must be discreet in order to seriously do something on the scale suggested.

The easiest part of doing something is the thinking part, the idea, you know ive spoken to people offline that have had a business idea, their excited and 20mins later they have already talked themselves out of it, because reality sets in quickly.
Thinking about something and doing something are both very different and the latter requires so much more effort.

My personal opinion, unless your willing to go all the way against a large corporation with a legal team, and in this case of it being a search engine, then it would have to be something so big that it would cost a fortune and probably go on for a decade.

So people say ok we know we cant do that so we are just trying to change how people see a rating system and to change how they think about it.
Would that very thing not be like trying to pimp something? its their patent/s what say or right do you have to control how people see it.

Its theirs not ours, its theirs to dictate, not ours, we cannot tell people to ignore it, that itself is arrogance and could lead to further troubles and difficulties.

Early last year people laughed and dismissed people like myself who used to politely suggest that people not put too much emphasis on things like that, and often most people would reply as if stfu you dont know about pr.
It wasn't a case of telling people to ignore it, just not to focus so much on it.

To think in the past that someone other than googles own company could control pr is very naive, and now you have people saying dont listen to google and their pr thing, ignore it like we do.

Allow me to point something out, the same webmasters who harped on about pr are now often the same who say screw it and screw google.

What many people have learned since the last quarter of 2007 that many people keep their mouth shut, many people have moved on completely from the directory business.

If you follow a leader who could lead your business up s**t street then that leaves us all ruined.

The past talk of uniqueness and not all copying each other does not fit in with the revolt agaisnt 3rd party things.

Internet business is very fragile, you can be raking it in one moment and ruined the next, conformity does not appeal to me but conform is what i must do, at least to some degree.

 

anon im just going by these

So why does the Directory Industry talk about 3rd Party Rating Systems ?

Doing that in a nutshell is just 100% giving free promotion to the 3rd Party

It was discussed in the past too, like an agenda to somehow rid it from wembasters minds.

With respect to all, how is Pete or anyone else going to stop other people talking about pr in the directory section of the forums?

It was a massive focus of discussion in the past before everything changed.

I used to read in new threads new guys announcing their directory asking things like how can i get more submissions and people would be like oh you neeed to get higher pr mate, yeah no one will really submit till you got better pr.

Then people here would say who do i submit to, oh right this top 10 here, yeah they have pr 5, 6, 7 they will searve you good, your going to get good pr then on next update.

So im pointing out that now guys are meant to refrain from mentioning pr incase it upsets someone in this secton?

 

I've owned directories for the last two years and I can't say I've ever used a 3rd party rating system once!..lol
I just try to allow quality links only into my directories and haven't had any issues with google.
It's not at all about the money to me, if only quality sites submitted, I would approve them all day long.
The payment is more to filter out the bs sites to me.

cheers

 

In a nutshell, my personal opinion is a search engine controls what it wants, and here on DP the mods control the threads.

People come here to discuss but people cant complain here when the very thing they were always talking about in the past comes back to bite them on the backside.

You cant tell people to ignore things because their not in your favour now, it simply doesn't work that way.

 

its the mindset of certain directory webmasters to base everything around pr
as long as there are people willing to buy links on pages and sites based on pr then these people will still exist
tbh I don't know why Britishguy wants to lead a crusade against them..are you not more pissed with google?

anyone who has the slightest idea has changed since google came down on certain directories last year
personally its not up to me to tirelessly point out others making mistakes but I see them happening nearly everyday
for anyone with a brain to just look around and do some reading most the answers are there
it gives you a good idea of how blind some people are when they are still doing exactly the same things that got sites banned last year

that was nearly always a group of directory owners supporting each other with recommendations anyway

 

PR was obsessively talked about in the past, it was like crack like an addiction, anyone with no currebt pr back then was seen by some as worthless, like you were not even worthy of mixing with others.

See so many in this section never quit talking about it, now overnight they expect thousands of other men and women to forget all about it.

And its true, there was a group who forever promoted the same higher pr directories, it was the clique thing going on.

And then at the end of sep, oct, nov 2007 you had some people cheeky enough to suggest that lower ranking directories owners were only setting up directories for business from the other higher bigger budget ones, and that people were somehow being kept?

Still the big mistakes being made are by some individuals believing they can tell other business men and women what matters, trying to control the directory industry.

 

i have commented on the blog post as requested would be looking forward to hear your reply

 

Keep trying to control the show and keep trying to dictate to people what they should be putting importance on and it will keep coming back to you negatively.

Forget trying to control anything.

 

Unfortunately, I can't read the foreplex article right now (will do), but I have a suggestion/question:

Is there a list of 'best practices' that the leading directory owners could come up with that would help guide other owners and submitters? I would think that would be as good a solution as any. I would also think that this would be much more achievable than some of the 'directory owners association' (or whatever) talk I've seen in the past.

Still, with the variety of opinions and approaches of this forum, and all the FUD from Google, perhaps a bridge too far.

 

tbh most of the common practices are a mixture of common sense and making your own judgement about what you can read in these and other directory related forums
the same questions have been asked so many time that you can take different answers and form a strategy using which you think are best

 

Not a directory owner, but I do have a graduate degree in business. Please permit a few, hopefully helpful, observations from the market side of the topic. Although the original post did not mention Google's PR system, the essay that was linked to was obviously referring primarily, if not exclusively, to it under the name "third party rating systems".

In the free-market world that most of us live and work in, third-party rating systems are everywhere, and their ratings dramatically affect the market. Let me list a few:

• Bond credit rating companies such as S&P, Moody's, and a few others independently issue bond credit ratings of corporate bond issues. That 3rd-party rating has a huge impact on the sale of those companies' bonds.

• Independent (3rd-party) movie and drama critics can make or break a new movie or play.

• Professional appraisers establish approximate market ranges for home sales. Banks and other lenders pay great attention to these appraisals and are unlikely to lend outside the range of the appraisals.

• Google and its PageRank system, in my opinion, fall under this same scenario. They are a "3rd party" that has established an evaluation system that works for them and their stockholders. We can ignore their PR system, just as we can ignore the bond credit rating (at our peril), the movie critics, or the appraiser's professional opinion. That's the nice thing about the "free market". We are free to participate or to ignore it and its ways of doing business. But generally, as in the above illustrations, we ignore it/them at our own risk.

 

Right, but then doesn't that mean best practices could be formulated, written down, and shared? Might make some peoples' lives easier (and the directory industry as a whole more healthy).

Besides, common sense isn't common.

 

But thats more like wanting to be taken by the hand, to have someone guide you, so if it all doesn't work out then its easy to say i just followed these guidelines that were put together.

And frankly i think its a much better idea for a directory to decide on their own and not look to the next diectory, your only holding yourself back.

 

that was probably true.