I have had enough & am walking out the door.

I see a few post's, re idea's & reviews etc, and as an old timer from the outside not up with you fast paced whippers, i thought i'd throw a small story from an outside view.

The topic covers empty catagories and will explore some options to fix it but I'm sure there are better ways.

Each week i now study 10 - 20 Directories, some new some so called established, and 9 / 10 times i hit the dreaded empty room ( i open the catagory and yep it's empty ), so you keep looking and bang sure as how's ya father the next room is also empty, well at that point ( and i can say 99% ) of your visitors ) will say thats enough and walk out of your back door, never to return.

It simply has to be one of the biggest turn of's in a so called established directory, or any directory.

You see lables such as we have 1 gazzilion catagories etc etc, yes all from a cat dump, but having all of these catagories empty ( if you going to load them all ) will only do harm not good.

Just think when you go out to the pubs, do you look in the door, see a few bums laying around, then back out to where the party is happeneing, every room is full of people having a good time.

Possible solutions, Load the catagories as you need them. You might say that won't work, but id rather have to suuggest a catagory when submitting than hang around in a empty space. ( mainly for free directories )

Or second ( if a paid directory ) i would post a big flippin sign on my cover saying new ( or similar )

Special Bonus first 3 people in each catagory FREE, 125 positions left ( this i would update & even state what they were with links if possible ). Then in each catagory that was empty i would create false listings with something like, Congratulations you are 1 of the first 3 people in this catagory sign up now to fill this position for free.

( at least it would not be empty. anyway i'm sure there are plenty of better idea's than this old timer can muster up.

Cheers & stay

 

Nice work I like the above quote, I only ever book mark or return to a directory when it has sites and goodies that are of interest, or that are hard to find elsewhere, If they don't offer much then what's the point of a directory ? May aswell just use Google.

 

Totally agree. Every directory i have made i have tried to add sites to it in empty cats. It can be very time consuming but i think its really quite important.

 

Filling up categories is the most time consuming work i have ever done on a directory.

 

Great post DownUnder, similarly i came to the understanding that empty categories were a turn off recently, at the same time i dont think they should be populated in haste, but definately not left empty.

Would probably often put someone off submitting for a featured too if its an empty category, as they will see no reason to grab a featured if theres no one else to compete with in the category.

 

yes we manually add a link to every category in our directory so there are not empty categories at all.
great tip.

 

Nice post!

What's your opinion on adding a news mod to fill in empty categories until they fill up?

 

I make it a point to have no empty categories - it does take up time to do it that way though.

 

Nice post DU.

Empty, or near empty categories (sorry, but just 1 listing is just as bad as none at all IMO) are a real turn-off.

@acuman - I don't care for it. I don't go to directories to read news.

 

I was thinking that too, it may look a bit obvious.

 

I believe you've brought up a great point. I also agree with Bernard -- I believe a category should have at least 10 links.

Meti

 

Do people still bother submitting to normal website directories?

We only use that stuff for blogs.

 

Do people still bother submitting to normal website directories?

We only use that stuff for blogs.

 

?? not sure but each person can make their own calls, i know Mikey ? & Dagree have made some really good news mods, for me i would use that mod to promote the areas i had available thats for sure, what ever it takes to get bums on seats.

Watch this space, yes is the answer, there is a whole new breed of normal / general / neiche / resource directory being born and they are here to play hard ball.

 

Im not sure what a normal directory is, but yes people still submit to a directory.

 

we have only 5 links in every page so i dont think that add 10 links will be good
also it is nice to not have empty categories but it is also not nice to ask to someone to pay for a listing in a place that are 10 non paid listings.But that is just my opinion and the way i want my directory to be.I want in the feature when is real established and old that 1 page to have only 5 premium spots for the real most promoting sites for every country in EU.

 

I too am pondering the empty category issue.

In my older directory, I had a number of categories with 1 or 2 old and established sites in them. The categories have been indexed and even have PR. Those old websites appear to no longer be online. The reason there were only a couple of listings was because after hours of looking, I actually could only find a few decent sites in a category that people are looking for based on my logs. (I only wish I knew more about those topics and could capitalize on this.) So those of you who say no empties - what would you do in this case?

In my other, newer directory, I have not done a lot of promotion (my fault alone) and even had a charitable organization ask me not to link to their site as my PR wasn't high enough. After that I've been a bit gun-shy. Has anyone else had that happen? Keep in mind this was before the paid links are evil and other directory penalizations by G.

I could easily fill up the newer directory as there are tons of commercial, MFA, and Affiliate sites that I could use. As a rule, I only add sites that are non-commercial (Adsense is OK within reason) that offer information freely. I think it's somewhat unfair to add commercial sites on my own as it is not fair to their competition. I had started this directory with the idea of making it pretty much a free-for-all as long as the site was on topic. When the same fellow submitted 10 of the same site, just with only slightly different URLs and affiliate products - I dumped all the junk - returning even more categories to emptiness. It does get a handful of submissions - even a few nice-sized brick and mortar companies, so I'm beginning to wonder if quality supersedes quantity despite empty categories.

After the New Year and the current peak season for my craft directory, I'll have more time to push the pets one and hopefully will get more of the categories filled with some good sites.

 

Did you see this discussion? Directory Structure 101 - Max Number of Listings per category page

Having a category full of competitors encourages companies to submit their sites in order to compete with them. I think many directory owners are too afraid of "losing" money by giving listings away for free. You aren't going to get every company in every niche to pay for a listing folks. Listing half the companies in a niche will encourage the other half to get listed (at least the ones that do SEO and check their competitors backlinks). Half is better than none IMO.

 

that is sneaky IMO not need to trick anyone to submit to my directory