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

Technorati Tags: Web Directory, MFA, PPC,  Geo, Submit

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
http://www.global-weblinks.com/modeller.asp?serieid=452&N=Travel_Agency

New category URL for the category: Recreation & Travel -» Travel Agency
http://recreation-travel.global-weblinks.com/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

Technorati Tags: About, Web Directory, News