A couple of years ago, after the web got overrun with general directories, I came up with a shorthand test for quality: do a simple search on a directory for ‘lotr’ (which is shorthand for Lord of the Rings). When I developed the test we had just come off of three years of LOTR mania inspired by the trilogy of movies. You had to be living under a rock to have missed it.
See I judge a directory by how well it helps human visitors find information. A good directory ought to list a mixture of commercial and content sites and I figured a search for lotr was a good fast way of testing 1.) how complete the directory database is, 2.) how commercial oriented the directory listings are.
Yahoo Directory: 417 sites returned
ODP/Dmoz: 115 sites returned
Illumirate: 25 sites returned
JoeAnt: 4 sites returned
GoGuides: 3 sites returned
Skaffe: 1 site returned
All these directories have been around a long time. The pleasant surprise here is Illumirate, which seems to be really trying to create a very complete web directory.
It seems obvious to me that pay to review creates too much of a barrier for content sites to submit and the directory suffers. Having volunteer editors in the smaller directories don’t seem to be working either, because the content sites are not getting added.
Requiring sites have their own domain is another problem. Good content comes on all sorts of URL’s. Limiting submissions to top level domains is about making things easier for the editors not for helping visitors find content. It is about the quality of the site not the domain.
Finally waiting for submissions may well be too passive to build a good directory these days. I think you really have to go out and add links on your own unless you are very well established.
Tags: directories, directory
