Marketing_Guy - 3:11 pm on May 27, 2008 (gmt 0)

I'm the SEO for a large UK directory which currently sees around 1.3 million visitors a month and is the core of a multi million pound business. I just wanted to reiterate some of the comments already made - the crap that Google just blitzed were hardy directories as such - they were dressed up link farms. There's a notable difference.

Their value was purely SEO and not traffic or exposure - of course Google was going to slap them.

Most people want to setup a directory thinking that they can throw up a CMS and let everyone else submit the content and there's no work involved. That's not the case. Not for a directory, not for any other type of site.

If you want to make money from any kind of business model then you need to put more thought in it than "people might pay me because I can pass them some PageRank".

As with any Google update or blitz, the lesson leanred is don't churn out crap, made-for-SEO sites and hope for a quick buck. Plan, organise and innovate.

What is the purpose of a directory? To allow users to find information (in a different way that search engines do). What are the pros and cons of that? What else can you add to the mix that might benefit users? What do I want to achieve here? These are the kind of questions you need to be asking.

A niche directory as part of a larger site is very different to a standalone directory which is different to a SEO directory which is different to a "quality directory" - they need to be treated as such.

MG