Bluefind Directory

This directory has been up for awhile, I first noticed it from a post that compar made. I have 2 paid listings in the directory (compar, you should contact them for your commission )

I've seen comments on other boards about this directory and wanted to get the opinions of this group now the directory has been up for a bit. Before that, here's what I've seen and my experience:

I paid for two listings. Both were approved and added very quickly. I expect this though, as it's $40 for a listing. The first one went perfect, the second one they changed my title to somethign I didn't want and haven;t replied to my inquiries about correcting it so far. I just e-mailed them yesterday, so this may still be corrected.

I saw on another forum that the PR8 this directory has is bought and paid for. I have not been able to determine if they bought monthly links or permanent links. Will the PR8 go away? I guess that depends on how many $40 submission the directory gets.

One thing that is somewhat concerning: I checked over 100 pages that are supposed to be linking to the directory, and can't find a single page that actually has a link. Granted, I took a small sampling of the total number of links. What's concerning is I wonder if the owners of Bluefind have already stopped paying for the links they bought to get to PR8. If they did, it's just a matter of time before the PR8 starts declining.

I knew most of what I know today about this directory when I paid to submit my sites. Just like anything else that involves $ it's a calculated risk, one that I thought (and still think) is worth the risk.

Opinions? Comments?

 

With new directories, I usually wait to see if any of the inner pages get any PR. So far all the subcats I've looked at with Bluefind are still at PR0. We'll see...

 

Some of have started picking up PR. Here's the Business & Industry catagory:

http://www.bluefind.com/dir/47.php

 

that doesn't display a PR for me actually

 

Does for me, PR7.

 

But none of the actual categories within that category has any pr - and that's where a link would be.

 

Correct.

In some of the other catagories though (like the sports one I listed in) if you have the right site you get listed one page off the index.

I don't doubt the PR will carry into the lower directories - that just takes time. It's a "newer" directory from what I can tell and PR hasn't worked it's way through yet.

 

I will wait around 2 more months before submitting to them, right now its too young to tell if the risk is worth it in my opinion.

 

The listing for my site just picked up PR 5:

http://www.bluefind.com/dir/5725.php

The question is whether this PR actually exists already and just takes a couple months to show up in the toolbar. In either case I'm glad I paid a $40 one time fee for a PR5 page

 

Yea, im noticing a PR5 for my catagories now too- hmm.

 

I'm looking through my inbox and not seeing anything from you concerning this. Did you email support @ bluefind.com?

BTW, thanks for submitting.

The PR8 is largely due to the Internet.com network advertising. We are planning on maintaining that advertising long term insofar as it delivers a lot of traffic along with the high backlink counts.

But, I believe we would maintain strong PR even if we did stop advertising there. We have IBLs from a lot of other high PR sites, too. Not just the Internet.com network.

The Internet.com ads are in rotation with 40 other ads, so don't expect to see them on the page very often.

Never. I love the Internet.com network. They deliver good traffic and I have no plans to terminate my space on their network.

We are adding links daily and expect to have interior PR8 pages sooner rather than later.

 

Yes I see categories finally getting a little pr, too bad that the link pages haven't yet.
I didn't know PR would travel so slow. It was a little fishy that pr didn't go through the 3rd level pages, yet the index page was pr8. I would have assumed that the 3rd level pages would have been a pr2 by the time the index page was pr8.

Maybe the lower level pages was indexed with pr, but they changed technology PHP versus ASP without redirecting the older pages? That is the only explanation I can think of.

 

The PR is helter-skelter (sp?).

http://www.bluefind.com/dir/5725.php <- That is three levels down and has PR5, then one level above has PR7, and the level above that isn't showing PR yet.

Another weird thing:

http://www.bluefind.com/dir/564.php Washington State shows PR5.
http://www.bluefind.com/dir/545.php Nevada, on the same level, doesn't show PR yet.

We did a mod_rewrite to shorten the URLs. I'm fairly confident PR will be showing on the vast majority of pages after the next PR update.

 

About time you showed up John Scott. If I'm going to be your shill on all these forums the least you could do is keep up with the traffic. Geez!

 

I believe the site will be just fine in the next update as well- You'll see some of my sites popping into your directory in the next couple days.

 

John, thanks for stopping by to clarify. I have no reason to doubt what you say, so I'll take your word for it. If it all works out like you're planning it should be a fine directory.

Yes, that's the e-mail address I used. I'll send the message again. Thanks for the follow up.

 

I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but for those interested in reading more about BlueFind and John Scott, click here to visit his forums.

Since I see a lotta familiar faces over there, I suspect most people know about it, but head-on over there for definitive info about Bluefind ... although an argument could be made (and has been made) that JS might be slightly biased (!) ... but as observed from his comments above, he's seemed open to constructive comments and answers 'em head-on, so I respect that.

I gave JS/Bluefind a "ribbing" because the Hulkmobile can't be found on it (it was a a thread comparing it to Google), but it's definately a different approach that Google.

There's a lotta wanna-be search engines/directories out there - bluefind seems to be more "interesting" than most and we'll see how it plays out ...

alek

 

I guess it would be smart to get into Bluefind now before it makes it really big

 

History is full of examples (ex: Yahoo - anyone else remember when this was run outa Stanford University?) where it woulda been great to get in early before it went big ... but hindsight is 20-20 ... much harder to predict beforehand obviousely.

So I didn't mean to say that Bluefind is "it" ... but among all the wanna-be's, it's one of the more "interesting" ones out there. As implied earlier, it's a bit more of a "serious" directory (the $40 fee is trivial for a serious business, but filters out the "fun/goofball/personal" stuff - Hulk's website has a buncha of those - and allows one to have a responsive staff versus volunteers (although I think ODP/dmoz is often unfairly maligned) and doesn't have any issues with multiple deep-links ... and from the discussion at IMR, John seems to want it to be much more than just another directory page rank link for 'ya ... i.e. something that is actually used to find stuff and (my guess) an eventual feed to other directories - maybe eventually selling to Google is one of the exit strategies?!? ;-)

It is somewhat ironic that a lot of the discussion about bluefind has centered about the page rank charecteristics of it, but this topic is near-n-dear to SEO'ers! ;-)

alek

 

That's kind of how I see it. It's only $40. If it goes "big" that's a bargain. If it shuts down tomorrow it's no big loss.

Compare it to $300/year to be in Yahoo's directory and it's a great deal