Event_king's recommendation of the month. What's yours?

I rarely jump out and recommend directories, but after checking my logs for the last 6 months, one is sending me some traffic on a regular basis:


http://www.kingbloom.com

This is delivering roughly 10 to 15 visitors every month to me, and although nothing to shout about, it's consistent and worthy of a mention.

This thread is about members recommendations to directories they use, so which ones do you like and what is the traffic like.

When posting, can members clearly show

amount of links
amount of traffic sent per month
years established eg: 3 etc

 

Make sure its not just their spider.

 

Consistently the best directory for me, traffic-wise, is www.2yi.net.

• 63 visitors last month
• 4.83 pages per visit
• 5 minutes-plus average time on site
• Bounce rate = 19%

 

Interesting, shame just 63 visits, I mean for a 4 year old site - but par for the course, as it's domain (2yi.net) isn't something I'd remember off the top of my head. My observations and feelings are:

• Nice amount of links (390,670)
• Silly domain name
• Average No of sites listed
• Far too many categories (927)
• Too many rules/guidelines, which people will ignore
• Forces users to navigate more just to add listings
• Very expensive for a General directory (Featured-Permanent - $64.95)
• Broken link on 'about pages of blog' - a blog with hardly anything to report

On one hand it prevents gaining an advantage by keyword stuffing eg:

1. Use the name of your site as a title (no keyword stuffing)

2. Add a useful accurate description (no keyword stuffing)


Then encourages it by charging a fee eg: Keyword-Rich-Title - $21.95.

A site that condones keyword stuffing - that's a new one on me.

Conclusion

-- Nothing special

 

Directories will not bring you for traffic, even yahoo directory and dmoz will not. 10-15 visitors per month is definitely nothing. 1000 visitors per day and 1000 visitors per month will be definitely different. The 1000 visitors in a day will bring you 1 or 2 sales, but 1000 visitors in a month will not.

 

I am pretty sure they are not real visitors as I have several sites there.

 

is it possible to place too many the banner ad or adsense on paid directory...

 

Those 10-15 clicks are probably people who clicked on a wrong link anyway hehe. I don't think directories get 1000 visitors a month, as they all do link swaps, yet doubt most have even 1000 links pointing their way, and any links they do have, are likely so off-target and underperforming so each link won't send 1 visitor per day, never mind 1000 as a group.

Most people know the following:

Used G directories at some point eg: YP, so are aware of bad ROI
Majority of searchers use Search engines
98% of webmaster dirs are unknown
98% of these don't even promote themselves
95% of webmasters can't afford paid listings on directories
20% of directories are too expensive eg: $79 for basic listing alone
97% are used for the free options only eg: backlink/SERP manipulation
98% only want webmaster traffic to extract the next $20 fee
99.7% of directories don't have any money - period!
90% are start-ups (less than 1 year old), and get no traffic to speak of
99% are run by kids in bedrooms

No money + no promotion for sites listed = ZERO ROI and a pointless existence. The 2 to 5% directories left are mostly niche, have some promotional effort happening and deliver some sort of result.

Only 0.5% of directories are famous web-wise, 0.2% have press exposure and probably 0.1% make million dollar profits.

99.9% won't be anything. It's a tough, tough publishing game and can only think the reason for starting a directory is to chase the easy money, but it's not easy money - yet many still waste time doing it. Advertisers will hate them and not use them, and there are easier ways of making money than directories.

There are few G dirs I'd recommend, can only think of 1 off top of my head, but many niche websites to recommend - which shows the appeal and power of something specialised. Only downside of specialists is they'll be a touch more expensive, but largely worth buying adspace on for the traffic.

 

The internet is all about "inter", Latin for "between". That speaks of links from one site to another. I just checked my Yahoo Links and found tons of links from lots and lots of directories. So what if they have no PR; only Google counts PR anyway. Other search engines don't care about PR. But they all count links, and directories do provide links.

 

You know that, I know that, but these kids aren't linking to make the web a better place are they. They just want the next fee, and they don't want to improve anything.

You know, Google might want to get people linking for some better purpose in mind, but their goal is primarily profit and pagerank is created with 95% in mind to be viral and to control users into promoting them everywhere. So I don't completely trust them as their 'Do no Evil' wants everyone to believe their actually doing all this to help us lol hehehe, no no no - they don't fool me for one second. This control of everyone's linking habits is very wrong and people should have the freedom to link to the small-time sites as well as the powerful - just as the web should be and I believe was created for.......

Actually the web wasn't originally designed as a linking machine, the concept was education, the web was also made a free for all service and got taken advantage of by many scammers early on - that's the problem.

After the scammers came the corporates like Amazon, Department stores and Finance groups all realising they could make a packet online, so up sprung many corporate websites with flashing banners and sales pages and education or the 'good of mankind' took a back seat. One good thing came out of this early on, and that was the willingness to accept and give up link space freely, until companies and people realised they could charge for links and that screwed everything up. Google tried to control it, and failed, at the same time many took advantage by gaming Google's system - the serps - and look what we have today

And directories are still trying today to scam the system, when it's pointless as Google has such a link hold over them, it's laughable that they try. Knowing this still goes on to the extent it does, just makes people distrust the directory model under the label 'scam' - which is what they are now, and why I don't help them, recommend them or anything.

Ok, some have good intentions, but these are the very few and who has the energy or time to 'work out' the good from the bad. The corporates don't and won't, I can tell you that for free, the easy thing is to ignore directories and everyone does - oh sorry, almost everyone, well you know who I mean.

Even though some directories are trying to redress the balance - their fighting a losing battle and despite heroic intentions, many lack what it takes to turn it around, and will likely lose everything. They'll look back in 10 years time to see the decade they just wasted link swapping or whatever - and that's plain dumb - not clever.

So lets face it Jim, directory links give so little and demand so much of people's lives, and that's something that will never go away. Is it worth recommending any of them????

 

But wasn't that the whole point of the thread

 

Perhaps not worth it, but I was just responding to your question when you opened this thread:

 

That's entirely possible. I keep my approach pretty simple — an inbound individual link might help and won't hurt, with or without PR or some similar metric. So I keep submitting to free directories for their tiny (but not zero) link value. Part of the reason I do that is I'm retired and have the time to do it, which many of you don't have.

 

The internet is all about links and directories are still a good way of getting them. Some links are better than others but of you have time submitting to directories with varying titles and descriptions is a good way of building links to a site. Yahoo in particular seems to like more links for my sites. Google seems a little more discerning - it like better "quality" links.