2 reasons I don’t recommend starting an article directory

Here are the two reasons I don't recommend starting an article web directory.

1. There are way too many already. I have 850 article directories listed on web-directories.ws. Some of the niche article directories look useful but the there are way too many general ones to make a new article directory profitable.
2. The rate of abandonment is extremely high. While doing research for our list of article directories, I went through a bunch of article directory lists. Although many of these were less than a year old, I found an incredible rate of parked sites, dead sites or sites that were no longer directories. I am talking about hundreds and hundreds of dead directories. I also have to remove a large portion of my own listings every couple of weeks.

I don't consider myself an expert in article directories as I have never owned one. Current owners would know better and I welcome their comments. I figure that there are too many and that the business model is not profitable. My advice for anyone wanting to start a new one is to try something else, maybe a niche directory.

 

Summed it up nicely CanadianEh, i cant say anymore on that, ive never considered one, doesn't appeal to me.

 

From a submitter's perspective - I've never understood the whole idea of giving away an article to gain a backlink or two on a site that only gets visitors who are submitting or looking for content to steal. If the article is worthy of having my name/site's name on it, I can think of a number of more productive uses for it than an article directory.

From a directory owner's perspective - Why would I think that a site that is 100% built on duplicate, machine generated, stolen, and/or generally poor content be able to make any money?

There was a fellow on here some time ago that wanted to give it a go and was going to insist on unique content and many here told him he was crazy for thinking anyone would agree to that. With that sort of mentality from potential submitters it would see a guaranteed losing proposition from the start to create an article directory.

 

The concept would make sense, if there were only a few article directories around. If you had no real competition you could ask and get unique articles.

 

1..uh.. that could be said about many sites.. to many forums, directories, arcade sites, social networks.. the list could go on and on.
2.. don't give up, if you don't give up, it won't get abandoned...

work on your sites, and they will work for you
simple concept really....

 

That's true, as long as its popular and has a high PR it's worth having one.

 

I never said they weren't worth having. I'm saying that that it is not worth starting a new one now. An original concept would always be the exception.

 

I started one about a month ago or so just to try it out..Its about the same as a regular directory.You have to weed out the BS that comes in.

 

People start them up for all sorts of reasons, the main one being they can make $20 for their next fix and move on to something else.

 

Great post CanadianEh. Most of the newer article directories we see are bundled with phpLD. I don't know why phpLD went that route, maybe to keep up with the joneses. I would have rather seen them enhance the web directory features in their script, like including some basic maintenance features such as a mass PR update capability.

When it comes to article directories, I submit to just a few. And I rarely write articles anymore. The problem is duplicate content. For web directories its not that big of an issue, because each listing detail page may be at most 20% duplicate content. With articles, that percentage is much higher and risks being identified as duplicate content. So there is minimal value for the submitter to include their article in many article directories.

As web directory owners, some try to avoid duplicate content by re-writing descriptions, etc. I could not imagine doing it for complete articles. And how much duplicate content does Google permit before it starts dragging down ones entire site?

I certainly would not want an article directory, and agree with you when you advise people not to start one either.

Generally speaking, if I have time to write an article, I will post it on my own site so that I get the organic search traffic from it and not someone else.

 

One main black way reasons to start a article directory is to harvest email addresses. I used to own a article directory which was sold mainly for high xxx since its had more than x,xxx,xxx articles xxx,xxx authors and hence xxx,xxx email addresses.

Article directory can make real good money if you understand how to work upon it.

 

LMAO funny but true...

 

I agree. Why do that work for a marginal backlink when it provides a boost for your own site's organic search traffic.

I suppose if it is a slopped together piece that you would be embarrassed to have on your site, you might pawn it off on an article site for the link value, but then what if someone actually finds and reads it?

 

I think that the main reason is trying to make money with adsense and trying to clone Ezine which i guess is not possible now.

 

Starting an article directory is not all that a good idea now! but from the submitters point of view, submitting articles to article directories helps a lot. The direct benefit is not too huge. most article directories have a lot of duplicate content so they are not cached and crawled properly. but there are some niche bloggers who finds some quality articles from these directories. those blogs have lots of unique contents and have high PR and lots of visitors. so if they copy your quality article along with your links in the footer it will surely help you get some quality related backlinks and so far i have seen that happen a lot, unfortunately there are some scrapper blogs who do this too!

 

Yes, there should still be advantages to submitting to article directories.

 

I have often thought of trying to use a directory script to create a typical content site. The site I am running where I am using a CMS was much harder to template and the search function is crap - both things most directory scripts have truly in hand. I am not happy with the site and the idea of updating the script for new releases frightens me even more than updating my directories. I plan for that site to undergo a major renovation in the future - what good is a search function that doesn't work right?

I suspect David's decision to include article directory functionality allows for folks like me with familiarity with setting up a directory to use phpLD as a CMS, folks who for some strange reason really want to create an article directory (though in some niches, it could work), and perhaps incorporate an article directory with a more traditional one.

 

thank god i didn't create "another" directory. it's overwhelmed!