Illumirate Directory

Has anybody seen Illumirate lately. What a beautiful job they have done with this directory.
A great example of how to build a quality directory. I think it was started in 2003.

Yes, this is well-known directory. I seen several years ago first time.

Yes the directory is nice, unique and innovative

Yup, great job they've done...all they need to do now is to clean up the site...it's full of crappy outdated links, parked pages and Sedo "buy this domain" pages...piece of cake huh?

That's a huge job if you have a large database, almost a full time job. My IT person added redirect detection to our link bot and found over 6,000 redirected websites.

Sounds like they have a lot of work yet to be done with it. Not to mention the huge backlog of submitted sites that they still need to go through.

It has been around a long time though so they do have that going for it.

I'm not a directory guy, but to me it looks just like any other directory. It needs a new design badly as well.

I guess you have to be a directory nut like me to get excited when you see great editing work, LOL! You just don't see that often anymore.

Great editing work? I'm just not seeing it. I haven't visited in a while but if they are claiming a recent remodel, perhaps they should have started with the copyright notice. whoops

For at least several of the listings I looked at the detail/opinion pages, the list of keywords was longer than the descriptions.

Not that I would ever suggest folks don't re-categorize when areas get full, but this does seem a bit of overkill and perhaps a structure like this should be reconsidered....

Home/Education & Science/Education/Schools/Secondary/Public/North America/United States/Arizona

Secondary, public schools in Canada are dumped in a category called "General" with an old/gone geocities site, the scholastic press association (American), the journalism education society (also American) and a defunct site.

On that Arizona page, each one of the listings looks like a list of the core pages/navigation of the site with "and more for (school name) in Arizona." In other words, they're all the same and look like spammy keyword lists. To me, good editing would include things like the school's location, their mascot, if they hold some sort of honor's status, etc. Not something like, "Administration, alumni, calendar, clubs, departments, athletics, and more for SHS in Arizona."

They have a lot more housecleaning to do. I wish them luck. Take it one category at a time and eventually they'll get through it. But, for now, I wouldn't be bragging about their editorial standards.

That site is temporarily down.

Directory is not working for me........

Working now, but loads too slow.

It was interesting to find this thread because, only a month ago, I had de-listed Illumirate because it didn't seem to be an active directory. I had sent a message to one of the contacts listed in the directory and it was returned as not being a working email address. I sent another message to another contact that I found in the directory, and the same thing occurred. Then I noticed that its copyright read 2003-2007, so I made it inactive in my directory of directories. Has anyone had contact with anyone at Illumirate lately, or had a site accepted there?

It's a tough one. Illumirate has been around for a long time:

http://www.seobook.com/archives/000008.shtml

That's an article from Dec, 2003. Back when the site used to be called HotRate. I have had discussions with Barbara York in the past, but not recently.

The directory has suffered from regular unknown exception conditions since 2011, and that is an indication to me that the site is either under regular attack or just doesn't have regular maintenance. Whenever I've brought this to their attention it has been cleared up quickly...

They have been a part of the Info Vilesilencer list for a very long time and currently sit at #4 on our top 100 list. I believe a listing in their resource is highly desireable.

It's really hard work. Unfortunately, the bot can not qualitatively identify the dead sites. Only manual inspection may reveal dead sites, sites under construction and sites with a redirect. If you, as the owner of the directory do not do it every day, then your directory will quickly turn into a dump of not working links.

Didn't know about them until I saw this thread. Looks nice but I think their design is quite dated.