The perfect directory. I have seen some directories like dmoz, yahoo and botw rank very high on just about every page while some directories don’t seem to get very high pagerank on any of their pages. Are ther best practices that are used here that are key to this ranking? What separates them from the rest, age of the website, marketing, strategy, patience or luck?
Their best practices were to be the first ones in the field and the ability to get thousands of natural backlinks
Uh....have you checked how many backlinks are pointing to these directories? That would give you a clue as to how they get such great rankings. Marketing and strategy. Not so much luck. Are you telling me you believe Yahoo just go lucky?
The no ads clause. I just added that to my reciprocal directory. if there are no links present for the category, i will show ads, if there are links present, ads go bye bye. I'll be doing this for all directories too.
A directory that a random surfer can visit 3 pages, if your visitors doesn’t run after seeing only 1 page of the directory, you have an almost perfect directory.
Yahoo/DMOZ are successfull because they did the right marketing for the right time. I don't think you can replace those with your own if you don't have a lot of money to start with. Although.. you can still pick a niche and make it the best one for your niche. Building a community around it will certainly help.