I could use a little help. I put up a couple of directories earlier this year. Well I'm starting to get a steady stream of submittals. I admit I'm have a little bit of difficulty in deciding what sites to approve. Sure, I can nix the porn, gambling, warez, ect sites no problems. It's the ones that look good, look right but I wonder if there are any use for them. They just don't say much, but where do I draw the line? I read up on other sites and their requirements in the posting guidelines, but I've been getting a few sites I just can't decide. And then there is the personal beliefs/ convictions that I just can't get away from. It it wrong for me to reject a site due to my personal beliefs? And I'm talking about more than religious beliefs here too. What about sites that I feel are just erroneous or misleading? I mean, it is my directory. At what point do I stop and reject a site? And there are many terms I'm still not familiar with. What are scrapper and "Made for Adsense Sites"? Should I allow deep links? I want a good directory with quality sites, but how picky should I be just starting up?
add quality informative sites your visitors would find useful. Scrapers parse RSS feeds and add the content - basically just make duplicate posts on blogs to make money. Made fore adsense (MFA) are spammy sites that are built with the only aim to make adsense revenue.
be as picky as you want to be just because someones site was accepted on another directory does`nt mean you have to just avoid poorly built websites and spammy sites and if you accept payments for submissions dont be afraid to refund and reject.
Every directory owner (at least the ones making a quality site) will run into this problem. As my directories are both niche sites, it does sometimes make the decisions easier; but I do have those that are marginal in topic, quality and just plain don't smell right. At any time, both of my queues have sites languishing in them. There's the sites that look brand new and have some errors - I leave it in the queue and recheck it when I can - still had errors ->gets deleted, fixed -> gets listed. Then there's the I'm not going to market you when you can't market yourself properly - the photographer who submitted to the Pet Portraits category and then has zero, zip, nada pet pictures on their site - sorry, no listing for you. And then there's the one's that I just can't make up my mind about - leave 'em in the queue and check them another day. I had started my second directory with the intention of making it generally a free-for-all; if your site was on topic you got in. That lasted a few months until what must have been the 8th affiliate site from the same person with the same template and almost identical URL. I dumped all the affiliate junk and while my site has less listings, the ones it does are ones I'm not ashamed to share. Think about how Google has handled this issue. "We are a business and we have a right to list or not list anyone we choose." Can't remember the name of the company (think it was a daycare but I'm not sure), but they sued G for being delisted and lost based on G's right to run their business their way. Funny really, when you consider how G keeps trying to tell webmasters how to run theirs.