My Directory Is Mature - What Now?

My directory, http://www.tiptopdirectory.com is now ~3 years old, has a PR of 3, and is usually somewhere between 40,000 and 43,000 on Alexa's global rankings...

I get plenty of free submissions, and some paid submissions. I've been selling those for $15/year...I have deeplinks added, but I'm here to fish for other things I should do.

I know I'm going to give it a facelift, as in make it look more professional - graphics/css wise. Other than that, I may add dynamic titles for the deeplinks, and perhaps take a few ideas from MasterMoz (imho the most beautiful/usable web directory out there right now), etc...

Other than that, I need to do some DB cleanup and figure out the best (hoepfully automated, mostly) way to remove spam links that have slipped past me in my db of over 71,000 links, and remove strange unicode characters that have passed into it as well...and also do some things like make sure all the link titles are capitalized, etc...

Anyway, I'm seeking advice from the directory gurus here at DP. Any ideas? I know she isn't perfect, but I'm still really partial to TipTopDirectory just because of all that I've put into her...

 

I am no Directory Guru---------but if your attitude is this

then good luck.

You could do much better if you concentrate your energies to make the site more useful to visitors - rather than occupy your mind for fishing.

Make a quality site - and fishes will just fill your Paypal automatically.

Cheers
John

 

I never knew how much money can a directory owner can make. it's really tough to convert all visitors into money, as most of them are avoiding paying money for links

 

I have found that too...

But besides that, all I really am doing now is cleaning it up a bit in places where I had some code that didn't work right and such, and am hoping for the best.

 

At this point I would suggest just closing the FREE SUBMISSIONS completely. There's no reason to devalue your directory by taking free submissions at this point. You likely see less submissions, but you'll find you have a better overall concentration of quality sites being listed in the end. People who pay for their listings tend to take a great deal of time listing them properly and offering up quality content driven sites that add value.

 

Yes, if you allow any affilate sites that link to trash in your directory, you may want to start eliminating those links on your site. A good directory investigates every site before submission, and if you can, use a box to test URLs as you never know what malware and crap you could be receiving.

 

Do any of you know of any good tools that would aid me in cleaning the trash from my directory?

I may have to code one up myself, I guess, but I want to remove anything non-ASCII, non english, and of course spam.

 

I like the directory a lot, but you need to get a new template for it. Also, just turn the regular feature into paid, a free listing offer will just attract spam.

 

Just make it as user friendly as possible dude.

 

Looks like your directory is running on PHP. You can loop through your database and look for non-ASCII site information with this code

    $input = 'site information here';

    if (! preg_replace('/[(\x20-\x7F)]*/','', $input)) {
    	// No non-ascii characters. Do nothing.
    } else {
    	// Has non-ascii characters. Remove it automatically or manually.
    }

Code (markup):

To make all titles capitalized, you can use "strtoupper" function. That will make all Characters capitalized automatically.

Hope that save you some time Good luck!

 

Thank you, oh wise PHP master.

I guess I could tie into the spamhous api and look for known ip/url/email addresses that are known "Bad" and remove them from the DB automatically too...hrm...

 

Hello ilikenwf,
I own a directory list website, where I'm going to inaugurate (within two weeks) a section that may help you increasing paid submissions.
Could I contact you by PM or email to give you more details about it?

 

There is more to maturity than just age.

For instance this is a description you added yesterday.

regcure , <URL> - regcure , registry cleaner , <URL> - registry cleaner

Editing leaves much to be desired.

I replaced the actual url.

 

Generally, there is no point in editing free subs. Either remove or pass them, is my idea on such things...

This directory started off a bit lacking and all, but I'm working on it in between my client work.

 

I agree. However with a PR of only 3 it could be a little tough to sell. I would recommend you still close off your free submissions and replace it with free submission with quality reciprocal. That way you can start getting some more backlinks and increase your PR.

 

This whole thread's more than a bit of deja vu - http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=877833

You asked these sames questions over 2 years ago and got pretty much the same answers.

 

No more repeated comments about your directory but yes excellent way of directory promotion, repeatedly!

 

It wasn't entirely intentional. I honestly forgot about that last thread.

I'm a college student, and am also doing custom PHP/MySQL projects mostly with codeigniter for local clients, and on top of that have other things going on too... I'm more than a little scatterbrained.

All that said, I'll take this into consideration, and probably add some new features to the old girl eventually, and will also work on a way of cleaning it up and increasing the PR. I don't know about selling, and I'd feel guilty not giving freebies for my site until it reaches PR5 or better, though.

 

You can focus to make your directory more powerful and in future close the free submission.

 

Make it more user friendly for starters.. add only listings that are useful to your visitors.. i can see a lot of rubbish links in there, just sell the site and start over, learn from your mistakes and aim to build a better one.