Are Directory sites are Dead

That's what moderation is for...

Right now 75% of this site is populated by crap posts from 2-3 rather heavily populated regions... Most posts are in Engrish and meaningless. Is what it is.... VB should come out with a filter for Engrish so those subscribed that do not want to see this crap posts can completely avoid them.

 

I agree Engrish is best for direcorie but any high pr is better for accept.

 

^ funny!

 

I wouldn't want to discriminate by region, as there are amazing people everywhere, but if you don't account for spam possibilities, quality is clouded.

 

Looks like they are growing

Fair call. A filter that auto-deletes any misspelling of directory or directories or reciprocal, etc would be brill!

Nothing can replace good moderation though...

hahahaha

 

Sure, I meant no disrespect with regard to geographic region or culture. However, given the larger population base both in those regions and here on DP, the law of averages dictates the quality of posts is going to be much worse over time. There's really very little denying the low quality posts coming from spammers and post padders and the direct relation to geography.

 

Heck, if you wanted to ban folks from the region of the world responsible for the greatest amount of crap posted virtually all over the web, you would probably have to delete around 75% of DP's membership.

 

There are many directories that had been switched off but still more active ..
So do not worry routinely wrote checks
Thank you ..

 

No not dead quality directories are still live.

 

They're not dead yet but I think they're not getting popular now.
Many had changed now and marketing strategies are getting different as well.

 

I think what is dead is the notion that a directory will some how instantly catapult your PR to the moon. Did not, does not and will never happen.

It is however a pretty key ingredient in an overall link strategy that should be comprised primarily of tools specifically designed to help drive traffic to one's web site.

 

I don't think they're dead, but not a lot of people visit them except to submit their site.

 

Directories are dead is a big thing to say. Directories no longer have the past glory might be appropriate.

 

A lot of a directory's usefulness depends upon how tightly controlled the categories are and how well-written the descriptions are. Problem is many directory owners do not maintain either their categories or their listings.

The advantage of a well-run directory is that a third party is writing the description. For example, when's the last time you searched for 'free images' of anything? How many of the for-pay stock photo sites come up in the results? They are certainly not free but they certainly optimize for 'free' related phrases. Everyone knows that iStockPhoto is a pay site, yet it comes up for almost every search for free images of ___ in the natural results.

My niches are littered with crummy MFA sites that are extremely thin on content but are operated by more experienced SEO'ers than the good sites. Quite often useless articles like "Making Christmas wreaths is a great family activity." will outrank a site with a wonderful tutorial on how to make a beautiful wreath. Even after Penguin, many sites in my niches continue to reap the benefits of high rankings they do not deserve.

A well-run and respected directory can easily send a site thousands of highly targeted visitors over the years. A good niche directory can see far more non-submitting traffic than submitting traffic - I know one of mine does.

I suspect that once a directory is established as a reliable source of site information by Google, it does help a site rank for things. Google has been saying for years that a well-run directory is a good and valid source of backlinks. Problem is that there are so few directories that are well-run.

 

From a "web user" perspective, directories are dead, except for some business ones (but even then, things like Google+ Local are making them more redundant by the day). For general content, there are other (and better) ways people are curating content these days (for example, Storify.com, Squidoo.com, etc) that fit in with the modern "social media" trend, if you're looking to use something different to Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Blekko, etc.

 

no,directory are not dead at this moment.

 

Perfection is often strived for and never achieved.

I would say that digital point has been developed well and done exceptionally well over the years. Is there spam, yes but nothing can stop that totally. Sounds to me like Shawn has taken measures above and beyond with out of the box coding end moderating to try and mitigate it.

One should not forget that directories get hit by just as much spam if not more than a forum does. I was getting murdered by spam submits til I had a third party programmer come up with a solution to mitigate the problem.

 

Number one way to eliminate spam submissions to a directory is to charge a fee to list.