ranking poorly because.... 1. The people don't know how to market them? 2. The script isn't good for SEO? 3. The Niche is too Narrow? 4. Nobody uses Directories Anymore? 5. Poor Domain Names? Or do you think it's some other reason? These are all based on PHPMYDIRECTORY which looks like a good script and has some decent 3rd party templates. But I have yet to find a single Directory using the script that appear to have any real traffic. www.b4uhotels.com - Alexa Rank 5.3 mil www.FindSoKy.com - Alexa Rank 2.5 mil www.whatcomcountyguide.com - Alexa Rank 1.9 mil www.actressactor.com - Alexa Rank 4.6 mil www.dcedental.com - Alexa Rank 1.5 mil www.costaricaweblink.com - Alexa Rank 6.1 mil This is just a small list. This is a paid script that has been around for a number of years. I looked at a lot of sites based on this Script and none of them seem to be ranking well. Maybe I shouldn't be using Alexa as a baseline, but it seems to be a decent barameter of sites in general. What do you think? Is this script a bad investment or are directories just a bad idea? Does anyone know of a Directory based on this script that is doing well? Any other scripts that are doing well or better than this one for Directories?
The alexa rank is based on traffic and it's only fair to compare them with sites from the same niche. Traffic only comes with promotion and SERPs so I'd be looking at that first. Bots like fresh content, unique content, pages with content and not just links, and finally inbound links. Then there's the age of the site, onpage optimisation... www.b4uhotels.com - has empty categories until you click on the alpha bar, spamming keywords www.FindSoKy.com - very tight niche www.whatcomcountyguide.com - Took me ages to work out what area the listings were for www.actressactor.com - tight niche www.dcedental.com - tight niche www.costaricaweblink.com - empty categories and really - how much traffic can a site focussed on Costa Rica expect to get? The only fair way to review these is to compare them to their COMPETITION and see how other directories in the same niche perform. Know any other Bellingham county directories?
sarahk covers everything just nicely above, so I'll just expand on the first directory as one thing that definitely shouted at me with the first one was the spamming of keywords, I think in one I saw 9 references to Canada on one page, example below: These are either manually put into the meta description or breadcrumbed so its what the search engines see. They won't like that spam. I didn't like the domain.com/categories/then_the_link.html either, shouldn't need to have the results go that deep.
2. The script isn't good for SEO? I would never blame a script for seo problems because you can always do something about that, either yourself or from a coder or both. Many people say Joomla is poor for seo but im sure many can make a joomla based site do well in the serps.
pipes you can blame a script for seo unfriendliness, all you have to do is look at that page it generates (url, layout, code, ...).
You can easily blame a script for SEO/SEM compatibility out of the box, but at the end of the day its all about the master. I have made tons of changes to mine to extend it.
Of course you can blame a script for seo, if it creates poor sitemaps that loop, unfriendly urls and more. I don't think pipes was actually meaning that even though it did read that way. What I think (and he can correct me if I'm wrong) is that scripts with these problems can be fixed to be resolved to work. Mind you, who buys a script to fix?
Well yeah i agree True You guys know what i mean though once you get the script you can do alterations if your a coder especially you can get busy and make any changes you feel neccessary.
there seems to be a lot wrong with them, they names arent that great first of all and page rank isnt great...also not much seo work seems to have been done on them.