HI guys I am just about to complete my first directory site . I am just wondering is there any criteria or rules to review someone site which has been submitted to my directory? Is there any method, things to remember , dos & donts?, What are the basic steps and pro level steps to analyze the website??? I appreciate everyone valuable time and suggestions. Thanks!
You decide the rules for inclusion or not and therefore that controls how you'll review the site. Some things you may look for are: Is the site made for ads Does the site navigation actually work Does the site add value to your directory Does the submitted text match the site and is the site correctly categorised. Sites should be placed in a category because it's the correct topic not because the category has more PR than another one Does the site carry site wide links and what are they linking to If it's a business site can you actually contact them, especially important if the site is selling. In my opinion/experience an email address is not enough. Is the site under construction Is the site just an affiliate site Is it the same set of articles that are on 1000 other sites? copyscape can be useful for checking how unique an article is. Watch out for the sites that appear informational and unique, however when you dig you'll find that they are all created by one person and all link to their real site. Some times this is legitimate but more often than not it's spam. I'd say be careful of single page sites, they tend to vanish quickly which leaves you forever deleting dead listings from the directory. If you use AdSense you have to also make sure the site won't put you in violation of those terms If the website submitted has private areas, i.e. paid for content, then they should supply access for you to verify it, if they don't then don't list the site as you don't know what the content is. Is the site using hidden text on the page? Usually this is hidden with CSS so using Firefox just disable CSS. If they are spamming don't link. If you read the sites copy is it well written or full of grammatical errors or written for search engines As I said at the top you decide the rules for inclusion therefore everyone will approach this differently. I for example will not list a business site that doesn't display a phone number, trading address and offer an online contact method. Don't be surprised if web masters get abusive with you for rejecting a site, but if you rejected it for a valid reason then don't give in to them as otherwise you'll quickly reduce the quality of your directory through making exceptions. To that end you need to be careful how you reply to any query or they can quickly suck up all your time. While not directly related to your question, do make sure you lock all top level categories or any that you don't wish people to submit to, if you don't lock categories to stop submissions people will submit to the top most category not the most relevant. You need to make sure that your terms allows you to edit, remove, move or do anything else you like to any listing at any time without warning. If you don't then when you need to recategorise to expand the directory you'll have problems.
Hey Man!! \ That are great suggestions I really appreciated I really need to study again !! Thanks a million!!!
That's a great set of suggestions, Tolra. You can also add "we won't link to anything we don't want to link to for any reason" to your guidelines, as a catch-all. Because there's always something that comes up that you haven't foreseen, and you shouldn't feel obliged to add anything to your directory that just doesn't feel right. Other aspects you might consider are design, accessibility and broken HTML. How does it reflect on your directory if you link to some very amateur-looking websites, or ones that a lot of your visitors find difficult to use? Some links expire a lot faster than others (and a 404 checker won't be enough to catch them all). So consider the url, because some are far more likely to go dead quickly than others: deep links, ISP member pages, free blogs, and so on. If you disallow these in your guidelines you will save yourself some work.
Re the 404 dead link checker, you should make sure your scripts dead link checker actively looks for domain parking rather than just 404 errors as parked domains don't always return a 404. If it doesn't you'll fill up with lots of domains parked for ad revenue. On the subject of guidelines you might want to point out that anything you link to is not your responsibility and you are not liable for any of their products and so forth. Your lawyer should be able to give you the correct wording for the disclaimers. There's a whole heap of other things that should go in there and probably a whole discussion in its own right.