Hi, What's your option about categories for directory? To have many of them with good tree organization, or few of them? Go deep into tree in not more that 3-4 levels? My thoughts are about SEO and general UX.
What type of website? Ofcourse if limited then id use just afew if its more abundant then many. Although i always say less is best. Just make sure to add a search!
It is easy to get carried away. We have 5000 categories, which are made up of 28 main categories, which then break down into 30 or more subcategories, which further break down into another set of subcategories. Typically about 3 deep. For example. A main category would be something like "Education". It is very broad, so it could cover everything from primary, K-12 to continuing education, technical training, college, etc.. Therefore the first sub-category breaks down to thins like "Home Schooling", "College", "High School", or even things that have to do with furthering education, like "Financial Aid". You could further break these down by listing another sub-category for "Colleges", by college, region, city, state, etc... Typically in a general directory I like to stop at that 2-3 sub-categories. If it was a more niche' directory say for only "Education", then I would suggest breaking it down even more. The only times I tend to break things down more in my General Directory is when I find a sub-category that is extremely full and warrants further hierarchical organization.
Cool @Mia. You've input all 5000 categories by yourself, or you did some initial standard import from other directory/directories? Regards.
The initial categories were provided in the script we purchased over 10 years ago. Over that time period we have manually entered them to the tune of about 3300.
Never create more categories than you have links for. The only situation in which it might be reasonable to so is if your pages include other indexable textual content, which might make even empty categories useful. Otherwise, a common mistake that I see are directories with more categories than they have listed sites. In order to get the search engines to index your pages down several category levels, you pretty much have to include unique, indexable content on these pages, apart from your category listings.
No, why would I. It works. No it does not exist anymore. We've re-written it many times over to suit our own needs. I've been editing it daily for more than a decade and have yet to miss a day. I find that the most important part of having a directory.
@Mia , Totally agree about daily editing! I've been with one script also about 10 years, or maybe even more, but as I didn't update in last few years and many, written in PERL which I don't know, it lacks many features I needed so recently I've transfer all to new one. New guys were able to transfer most of data so data loss was minimal which was very cool.
We needed something that helped us constantly keep up with dead, dying or changing listings. There are a number of sites that either disappear, or end up revived as something else, or worse yet, forwarded to some website that has nothing to do with the original site's content making the listing/category it is located incorrect. Those websites require manual re-review in some cases, removal, in other cases recategorization, new descriptions and keywords. We also have people contact us with their own updates since we do not allow people to manually edit their listings. In those cases we hand edit any changes from the URL to the description, etc... We also do not charge to modify existing entries, which is a nice plus for our customers. I've also not changed our pricing since 2005. I should, but I have not. We have kept the entry barrier quite low, yet high enough to avoid getting bombarded with MFA' and crap sites.
Cool. Nice to hear that stories like that. And you're satisfied with number of (paid) submissions and visits?
It has been very consistent over the years. I've seen no major slow down or speed up. Even with all the hype about disavow tools and all this other fluff.... We've always maintained our directories, kept them up to date and been responsive (SAME DAY) to any and all requests. It would be ideal if I could have turned it into something so much more, but since my costs have been relatively low I have extended those savings onto those that list. I started it more as a way of giving back to the online community at the time. All these later its still here and people still list in it daily, so it's obviously been something of value.