I need your help. I need to decide what actions I need to take with one of my directories, www.addurl-free.com Either I sell it on auction or I change it majorly, I have not decided. I rather want to keep it then sell it and so the question is what I should change. If I get some very good idea here I will reward you. Some facts: It gets around 500 uniques daily. Average 137 new submission daily Adsense revenue is around $2,7 daily - $80 per month, very low Google is refusing to index the site properly and the project with the detail pages in the SEs did not work. It regularly gets more backlinks from submitters wanting a featured link. To hire an editor to take away spam and approve submissions costs me about $400-500 monthly. Very expensive ... Current backlog almost 10K listings Each time my editor approves a link an e-mail is sent with promotion for my link building services which sometimes gives good leades - very valuable. All submitters have agreed to get e-mails, that is 35K e-mails of webmasters that can be used in mailings, very valuable. Selected links gives me about $200 per month, quite good. The directory sends about 50 visitors daily in total to other sites of mine which is quite good. Directory submitters somehow manages to find my e-mail and sends e-mails about their link to be changed or other questions = very annoying and waste of my time. I have now the feeling that to keep the directory in it's current state and pay an editor will cost me more than the benefit it gives me back. If I sell it I hope to get more than 5K and then I don't need to "waste" time and efforts on this project anymore. But I rather want to change it, what should be done? I need to get down the editor costs. Full complete redesign and upgrade of script Change to enforce an even larger description to combat more spam. I think 300-500 characters sounds good. Reciprocal required ?? Instant approval but with nofollow on unpaid links? Then the editor can just search for spam words and delete those = very small editor costs. Pay for inclusion?? With the name "free" in the domain name? Don't think so. What should the featured links be? Paid? Any other ideas? Suggestions? Give me something good and I reward ya!
Interesting dilemma, the best solution is to turn it paid the only thing that is wrong is the url. Put free links with nofollow, and automatic acceptance on paid links. Implement an automatic reviewing system for example “sexâ€, “pharmacy†on title or description doesn’t enter etc. Hope it helped.
One of our directories has a similar problem, and you can discuss all the options, for and against, positive & negative, and we have come to a single solution Do a 1 off clean up delete and approve program, then close the door on free submissions and make the site payed only. All the other options seem in our opinion to get you back where you started, ie nowhere, with still a big headache a 1000's of submissions to sort out That is the problem nobody wants every month
Thanks. Ask Directory sure gave me a few good ideas. Unfortunately, turning it to paid is not an option. Not with that domain name and not when a big % of the traffic comes from SEs on searches of add url free, add url etc. And I already have 2 other paid directories.
Seems the fastest way to have it earn some more revenue is the mailers. A regular newletter where you can sell some ads might work. Content is an issue. Webproworld does well in adding some hot topics from their forum. Maybe link up with DP here. You promote some good topics and it gives you some content. I think a lot of forums would jump at 35k reading an interesting topic. If your content is good enough most people won't mind the email and that give you a lot of room for sales. Then hire someone to keep your directory up to date.
Hmm, interesting adacprogramming. But I have never done that I don't think I am interested in that work. I'm an SEO, not an e-mail marketer. Sending you a PM for a quote.
Yes, I could write a good newsletter with links to good places but not on a regular basis. I think I will redesign it.
1. Upgrade of the script. 2. New design 3. Better mod rewritten deatils pages. 4. Take this directory and use the 3-way linking to start up another directory elsewhere.
Hey Jim, Your site certainly seems to get some nice traffic with your free submission offer. But it seems this is mixed blessing for you. Namely, "In total 24918 active links in 93 categories. 9862 pending links." This really has to change. Just a little simple division shows that you average about 250 active links per category. That is very bad as no one wants a listing on page 25 of a category. And some cats will be more popular than others (maybe having 800 links in them ). For a directory with 25K links, I would expect you to have 2-4K categories, not 93. Fixing this will not be easy as even if you spend the next few days creating ALOT more categories, you would spend months re-reviewing all the listings to place them in their new, more appropriate spots. Next, the nearly 10,000 links awaiting review is MASSIVE. Someone suggested ending free submissions temporarily to catch up on review. I would agree but understand that you don't want to suspend free submissions. Well, to get caught you really need to hire help to get those sites reviewed. Doing this alone, and taking, for example, a very fast review time per link or 1 minute, and spending 2 hours every day on just reviewing for THIS site....it would take you somewhere around 200 days to review all the listings currently in your queue (of course there will be alot more added by then). So hire some help or try to get some volunteer editors. Also, to gain this many links, you had to accept quite a high percentage of the links submitted to you. I know many directory owners are wanting to get as many sites listed as possible to their directory, after all, having 25,000 sites listed in a directory is something to brag about. But having 10,000 high-quality sites listed would be much more valuable to your users and to you in the long run. A search for a VERY popular spam keyword such as "viagra" or "sex" shows that a great deal of garbage is getting listed. So all of you existing links would need to be re-reviewed to clean up the garbage. A very high percentage of the sites listed form the search queries I mentioned are from spammers using auto-submitter software....you can tell because they have all the classic signs: unbelievably keyword-stuffed titles, descriptions that make no sense at all, triple-hyphenated .info domain names, titles and descriptions in foreign languages, etc. With a much larger category selection, and most of the crap sites out of your index, you (and/or your editors) could then start to populate your direcotry with quality, authoritative sites that make your directory much more valuable to the user. Let's say you manually add 100 really high-quality sites to your directory everyday. That would equal 3,000 high-quality sites added to your site in a month. Not bad. You probably would get 1/10th that many listable sites submitted to you for free in that same time period. With the massive amount of work involved with the above suggestions, you may (even though previous submitters will curse you for it) is to just dump the whole database and start over, because it would be much easier to start over fresh, than to try to correct the above problems now. But if that isn't an option (and I would certainly understand it not being an option), then the above suggestions aren't impossible to implement with some hard work. I also agree with the above posters that a new design is the way to go. It doesn't have to be super-flashy or anything, just something that looks clean and professional. Something that says this website is very well maintained and taken care of. You mention you may consider selling it for the right price. This is DEFINITELY what I would do if I was in your situation at this point. If you could get 5K for this site, I would definitely suggest selling it. You make a little money and all the above problems are someone else's to figure out. You can take that money and invest it in another project of yours, or even start a new venture. Best of luck with whatever you decide to do with your directory. Hope all works out well.
an0n, yes, but mod_rewrite on detail pages are not needed. Should be fore the numbers of the category pages. PortProphecy , Wow. Well, hmm. Shit. Man. After reading this I think I should sell it. But your idea is a to make a good directory for the users with quality sites - this was never the intention. A general directory for users are doomed to fail. DMOZ failed .... No, this directory was for the benefit of the submitter and the webmaster and for promotion for me. It is an SEO related site giving free backlinks. New listings are sorted first so they get a benefit. Do anyone think I can get 5K for this? If not, I will redesign.
its possible to get that but it will be a matter of the pending links at the time of sale. if the new owner has to sort 10k listings and not to mention the new submissions, it will be hard task for him to pay 5k and on top of that pay xxx to another person(s) to sort the submissions. what can be done is, stop the submissions for a few days or until the end of this month (remove the form itself leaving some message), go through the pending links, add more categories. you dont need to move the existing ones to the new categories, but the future ones can be moved in there as and when you review them. moving the xisting ones will be a nightmare. immediately do an upgrade to the latest version of the script, do a search for viagra, sex and stuff, check all and remove them
it is something people really like to see though, believe i or not. i guess the site of seeing your very own website(title or url) as part of the uri just makes certain people all tingly in their nono places. hahaha Derek, dear god... if i had read that prior to ever starting a directory, i seriously would have walked away
Yea, I guess that post was a little brutal. Wasn't meant to be. I was just viewing the site and brainstorming. Hope you get some ideas out of it. As far as getting that price you want in a sale, I would suggest spend a couple weeks cleaning up things as best as you can, and then seeing what kind of price you get. You may find someone who has plans for your site that may make it worth that 5K amount. It wouldn't shock me if you found a buyer at that price.
Thanks Praveen, makes sense. So I decided to keep it actually. I have just implemented the "Extremely long description" 500-1000 charachters Then it will be easy to see which ones are not ok and delete. Also I believe 80% of submitters will give up. So I will contact my editor again. And find a person for redesign.
Thank you all! Now I have decided what to do, I will keep it. PortProphecy, praveen and an0n, send me a PM with your paypal and I send you $10 each for your help.
Actually right now, while outside smoking my ddeath stick and after reading one of my clients plea to try and combat spam submission, i have an idea to help combat the issue. I'll run it by Boby to see what he thinks as far as maybe trying to get it into 3.07. Regardless though, I am going to research it and implement it in my directories' structures. This may prove to be really successful in fooling the spammers bwahahah!!! No need for that. It's pretty much part of my daily 'things to do', whether it be fixing, helping, installing or suggestion etc things for someones directory. I just help out like that. And like Derek said, go and get yourself a couple of beers. Rob
Rob, Maybe I have been messing around with directories for too long, but I truly think the spammers will always be one step ahead of us. They can't be stopped. They won't quit. They don't die, they multiply!