Blog Directory added to Global-Weblinks.com
Now that I have made a my own blog, my attention came to how I manage blogs on my international directory. Sadly they have never been given much thought, so I just threw all blogs into one sub folder on a temporary category.
Today, I have expanded my general directory with a specific blog category. Slowly the blogs allready approveded in the directory will be reviewed again, and placed in the new sub categories I will make on demand.
This way I can have a clean area for blogs only, and at the same time get them out of the other categories around the directory.
If you are a blog owner, then you are more than welcome to add your own blog for free, and get a little link love 🙂
Blog moved
Ok, it didnt take me many hours to realize that I really had to move this blog, so better do it now before I write to many posts.
I have moved the old posts I had on www.directoryfreak.com to this new domain.
New domain is www.clausheinrich.com and this will be my primary place to speak my mind and ideas in the future.
I will use the next couple of days setting up the blog as I like it, with design, functions, plugins etc..Stay tuned
About selecting the right blog
I thought https://wordpress.com had the right blog for me, but here at day 3 I realize that it was a wrong pick. If I had done my research a bit better, I could have saved myself some double work.
While I love to have complete control of things, the point getting my hands down into the blog code and eg setting up my meta structure on every sub page is impossible with the wordpress.com hosted sites. No FTP rights
It seems I should have downloaded the version at https://wordpress.org instead, to get the flexible version.
Im to lazy to change this now, so it has earned a spot on my growing To-Do list, but it should remind me to checks things better, before jumping into the unknown
Thoughts and observations from a directory owner
My biggest surprise on the directory market has no doubt been the amount of lousy sites submitted, with the only sole intend to earn money on eighter PPC or affiliates. I get flooded with Made for Adsense sites (MFA), where you see a lousy design, 3 big blocks of ads, and somewhere a bit of content that have been taken from some article database, and therefore are considered duplicated content.
Of cause I delete all these sites, but the amount I see is scary, and time consuming. Some MFA sites are pretty easy to spot, but there also some more clever ones who initially hide their intentions. This is why it is bugging me more and more as the time goes by.
Fact is, when I review sites today and I spot a block of ads on the frontpage, my thought have already been clouded about the site, and they have to prove me wrong when reviewing deeper on the site. While, if there are no ads at all on a site, the approval rate at me is almost 100%.
How I think ads should be used on a website:
I think ads can be great on a website, but the intention has to be right. A website with good content and returning visitors, could without problems throw in some ads here and there. It does not work, if you start out with placing ads on a template site that thousands of others also are useing, and then fill in some content. It is waste of your, my and others time.
Regional – International difference:
I am running both some international directories, and some regional directories in Denmark and Sweeden, and there are a huge difference in type of sites submitted. The regional ones are very clean and informative, and very close to 100% gets approved. While international sites, the approval rate is around 40%. Hmm, why this difference?
If you have some good ideas, just throw me a comment.
I would love to get rid of the bad sites, because they are really time consuming (I use around 5 minutes in general pr site I review), so its around 36 minutes of wasted work, and 24 minutes where I find good sites per hour of reviewing.
A way that works, is to put payment on submissions, but that will ruin my thoughts for the directory. There are some really great sites out there, who wont use money on submitting sites, but they are exactly what a directory needs. Quality insurance is hard 🙂
Geo vs type:
I have been studying the submissions I have recieved, and placed a geographic location on them. Some of the clear things I have drawn out as personal conclusions is eg.
- Canada have the highest submission rate of MFA sites
- India have the highest submissions on SEO, webdevelopment related sites. Very nice sites they make. Good navigation.
- UK have the most informative pages in general
- Australia, New Zealand design the most beautiful pages
- Many european sites, submit native sites, even though my rules state only English 🙂
None of these observations are facts, but just what I belive I have seen through the last 10.000+ sites I have reviewed this year throughout all of my directories.
Now I got this of my chest, and more observations and thoughts will probably come in the future
About Global Weblinks Directory
The 22. February 2006 I launched my first english web directory. My plan was from start to keep it free for all to submit to, and only accept quality websites.
Global-weblinks.com is an international directory, made from scratch in ASP/VB by myself. The first line of code was made 2 months before launch, and is still going on this day today. The directory market is pretty hard, so I am convinced that uniqueness is a bonus. So regular updates is made, and will continue in the future.
Initially, I had a category structure with alot of querystrings, so around june 2006 I changed the complete site structure, to be more upto date with how search engines work.
An example of how is was, and is now. Everyone should be able to see an improvement:
Old category URL for the category: Recreation & Travel -» Travel Agency
New category URL for the category: Recreation & Travel -» Travel Agency
This upgrade means that both the human eye and search engines, alot easier can tell what is on the location of the link.
In practice I have made the main categories into subdomains.
shopping.global-weblinks.com will be considerated a domain for it self, and the URL has already described the main theme of the domain: Shopping.
This is perfect when running a directory, because it is very easy to be considered a link farm, if you just have tons of different links on one domain. On my way, I can make sure that all links on the domain http://shopping.global-weblinks.com/ is related to online shopping, so the relevancy for the subdomain, will be clear for especially search engines.
Another great bonus is how PageRank (PR) distributes through the directory pages. With querystrings, the PR is weakened alot, and will only distribute 1 page down. =Bad
With the static URLs I have now, I get full benifit of the PR when I distribute it down to the actual detailpage that every link in the system have.
Future Plans:
I get alot of submissions, and to many for me to keep up. So the queue gets larger and larger. I could remove the free submission for a while, and I have done once before to clear backlog, but I think I will just let it be.
It can be a good check for me, if the review delay is 2 months, if the submitted page had other intensions today, than the day they submitted. MFA sites and such is not anything I want in my index ^^
But regarding to future updated I have been thinking of, is to make a regional part on the directory system. At the moment I collect language base on all submissions, and with a little codeing, I can make it so you can see the entire directory, with only land specific sites.
End note:
If you have a normal website up and running, I urge you to submit it to my directory now, and if you have any good ideas for me, throw a comment please
Some SEO tools I like to use
When developing websites, and especially optimizing them, its a good thing to have some usefull tools.
http://www.iwebtool.com/
These guys have a good selection of tools for webmasters. I can mention:
- Domain lookup
- Website speed test
- Reverse IP lookup
- Ping tests
- Link extractor
- Meta tag extractor
- Pagerank prediction
- Backlink checker
- Link popularity
And alot of other tools.
They also offer webmasters to incorporate theese tools on your own page, so you can give this service to others from your site. That is a sweet feature
This is a great Domain Popularity checker from LinkVendor.
You can easily cross check searchengines for backlinks and strength on your site (or your competitors 🙂 )
http://www.backlinkwatch.com/
Quite good backlink checker. I like the output, even though it takes some time to get through all links.
New Danish Webmaster Forum
As an addition to my regional danish directory, Iv added a new forum, where danish webmasters can come and discuss anything with relation to webdevelopment, marketing and such.
The forum is pretty new, but I hope in time it will be a gathering point for danish webmasters. I love to hand out of the knowledge I have, if people need help.
I know it is hard to get an active forum up and running, but also thought it was a shame many of the tips and ideas I and others I communicate with, never reached a broader public.
If I get emails or contact with questions regarding webdevelopment, I refer them to the forum now
The first message on my blog!
Well, first of all: Welcome to my new blog.
Iv made a ton of webpages in my time, but never tried out blogging. So here goes.
The intention with this blog is to inform about the things I find interesting or want to share with others.
My main audience with time will probable be webmasters and people with interest in SEO.
Guess that goes for a first entry in the blog 🙂