JLH Design

If you were persistant enough to visit Matt Cutts blog, scroll to the bottom of the page, click the previous entries link, click the next previous entries link,  and then scrolled down the How to Report Paid Links post, you may have noticed that Matt updated this post in the most quiet manner as possible, 3 clicks deeps from the home page.

On May 12th he added considerably more content to the original posting which has already received over 600 comments.

In an effort to justify defend the existence of paid directories he wrote:

I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.

Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.

I thought directories were really web 1.0, but I guess since the flood gates have just been opened again, I thought I’d start my own.  I really wanted to avoid the bestweblinkdirectoryontheplanetforyoutouse.com type of domain, so I started to look for one that has SEO in it.  SEO is the reason we are doing this right? SEO.com was taken, darn it, someone beat me to the punch.  BUT www.eseeoh.com ( get it? ES - EE - OH )was still available!

Now, should I really build a directory that is going to be 100% genuine human evaluation?  I don’t think the world needs another one, but Matt Cutts says its fine to sell those links evaluations, so maybe I should.  An honest site evaluation would take me 1-1/2 to 2 hours to complete, which should mean I will have to charge between $210 to $280 to make it worth my while.  That’s still less than the Yahoo! directory, and we don’t know if they’ll even be around a year from now.

So I grabbed my first SEO based domain, if you don’t count www.linkthingy.com which I haven’t finished either, maybe I’ll turn it into a directory, fully blessed by Google of course.