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pageoneresults - 4:59 pm on Dec 31, 2004 (gmt 0)
I'd like to expand on this one for the New Year. I've watched the directory space for years with great interest. I've seen them come and go. I've seen them get penalized and outright banned. There is a plethora of topics right now developing at various search engine marketing communities concerning the penalization and/or banning of a very large number of directories. After spending untold hours researching, I've come to the same conclusion I did years ago. You cannot use an off the shelf script in its raw form. Nor can use an off the shelf script with just a few minor tweaks, everyone else caught on to that. If you are going to do it, you're going to have to start from scratch. Yes, you can use one of the canned scripts but, you need to make sure that you change every single footprint that script may leave, and I do mean every one. Here are a few common footprints that are sure targets for search quality engineers...
Don't use an off the shelf directory script.
Unless of course you've changed every footprint that the script may leave. Sorry Script Makers, there are too many abusers of your scripts out there and the footprints your users leave are very easy to track, even by the most unsophisticated types. If I were a search quality engineer and noticed these footprints were abusive in nature on a large scale, I'm going to take out your entire user base, no questions asked and no explanations given.
For those of you new to this, let me share a little history with you.
Years ago, there was a program called WPG (WebPosition Gold). It was a great concept and one that many adopted and used. Unfortunately, many were also abusing it. Well, at some point, the abuse reached critical mass. The search engines were tired of the resource drain and made a very severe move and wiped out a large portion of WPG users. AltaVista did this and it was one of the biggest bans in search engine history.
Next came programs like Zeus. Another great concept but one that was flawed from inception. It didn't take long for Zeus users to find themselves completely banned from Google's index. Or at least those that used the free version.
Then came networks like SearchKing. And the list goes on and on.
With the proliferation of directory scripts now flooding the market, it appears that everyone is jumping on the directory bandwagon, again. Please, take my advice, stop now if you don't plan to invest some major time and finances into developing a directory with integrity.
And, for all of you script developers out there, you really need to hire a professional marketer and technical type from this industry. You have to understand that many of your script users are not techies and are causing some major damage out there, to themselves, the search engines, our industry and, the integrity of your scripts.
You need to address the fact that your users will gladly drop a few hundred thousand empty category pages into the indices. You need to prevent this from happening. If a category is not populated, there should be a feature in place to prevent it from being indexed until such time that it is populated. There are hundreds of things that many of you are doing wrong and it is causing harm on a global scale. Stop it already, would ya!
P.S. Once the abuse starts with these types of scripts, it is only a matter of time before users of those scripts will have blanket issues to deal with. It is much easier for a search quality engineer to take out an entire user base than it is to try and figure out which users are the abusers.