I am thinking of starting a new odp style web directory. I am carefully planning to go up to 2-3 levels deep in the directory initially and later as time progresses i am planning to build more deeper levels. I am building these categories myself and classifying them accordingly to the best of my knowledge. i am not using the same category prototypes available from dmoz or phplinkdirectory. Right now, i want to know what are the most important sub categories and where most number of submissions come from or people submit to ??? Please if you own a directory, share your experiences with me.
i think all most cat.. in dmoz with full tree of level. You can set the order of most popular categories on top of main category..
Won't It have a negative effect of my directory on search engines if i am using the same catagories as Dmoz?
Shopping and business to business are the topics that get the most submissions with real estate and travel and tourism closely following.
as long as you dont feed the dmoz results, i dont think there is any problems with search engines. as you might see there are 1000's of sites feeding from dmoz which is really a headache from search engines point of view to avoid duplication. many search engines bank sites with duplication of results. also, dmoz is the largest and ever built human classification of www and it has become a standard taxonomy for many directories. As far as i know, how well you classify and organise the submissions, play such an enormous role. the big headache is 90% of site submissions, people dont dig deep and submit to relevant category and they rush.
I've seen (pretty much in this order) Shopping/Services - Gifts/Occasions - Consumer Electronics - Home/Garden Health/Fitness - Diseases/Conditions - Alternative Medicines - Weight Transportation/Travel - Lodging - Limos/Shuttles - Agents Financial Services - Credit/Finance - Insurance - Investment Services These seem to be the big ones I have seen. YMMV. Good luck.
If there will be some negative effect, the reason of the effect will be duplicate content submitted to your directory. Keep in mind that webmasters submit their links to many directories with the same title and description (ok, they change the title and maybe the description too, but there will be always many other directories with the same content). When you think about categories, think about usability too. For example, when I add my web hosting company to the directory, first I am looking for category Internet and subcategory web hosting. If there is no Internet category, I am looking for computers category and hope that there will be Internet > web hosting subcategory. But sometimes the directory owners are TOO creative and create categories like webmasters > services > www services > web hosting. In my opinion, this is creativity in the wrong place. If you are trying to have your directory original, what about to require longer description then usual? It can be useful for you and webmasters who will add their links too because webmasters will need to write a few unique sentences about their websites. After some time, your directory will be full of unique content, SE will like it and the webmasters links will have higher value (from the point of SE). It is win-win situation. Good luck with your directory!
You are doing it the right way, olddocks. shopping and business catgeories are popular and the most popular categories is "Directories" cause you get several submissions from the directory owners themselves