GoGuides.Org went free?

Not showing an express submission option today.

[gnikiv]

Went on to submit a site and only the FREE option is a there. Did they remove the Express Review option? Do we just have to wait for review now?

[cornwall]

Seems to be free alright now. I assume that they were not getting enough submissions after they introduced the pay option.

Perhaps we should all go over there and submit before they decide to charge again ;)

[gnikiv]

Why not leave the option for both though. I had no problem with the $40 dollar charge to avoid waiting.

[cornwall]

Quite honestly I would doubt that there is a "waiting time" for a guide to get round to your submission. In other words whether you were to pay or not, you will be indexed in a few days.

On scanning some of the regional categories there are very few sites indexed. My guess would be that the cost for entry dropped entries so much that they were not expanding fast enough with paid submissions backed by guides "finding" their own sites.

Anyone from GoGuides upper echelons like to comment?

[Gorilla]

I submitted a site to GoGuides yesterday and it took less than ten minutes for it to show up in the directory. Nice :)

Looking at the alexa traffic rank statistics for GoGuides it seems they have received a significant increase in visitors over the last few months. Anyone know how they drive traffic to the site?

[rfgdxm1]

I happen to be one of the bottom level GoGuides. Doesn't look to me like GoGuides has very many listed sites. How old is GoGuides?

[cornwall]

>> Doesn't look to me like GoGuides has very many listed sites. How old is GoGuides?<<

Joeant and GoGuides both started about the same time when Go folded

I could be wrong, but from memory I think it was in the region of 2 years ago, or just over.

I had not really looked at the number of listed sites in GoGuides until I played around with listings when I read the first post in this thread.

The paucity of numbers of sites listed presumably demonstrates that there are not large numbers of available, honest and industrious editors to be found.

[gnikiv]

Party is over for the Free submit.
It's back to normal at GoGuides.Org. Not a bad idea on getting submissions and keeping the queue down. Turn the Free submit on and off depending on the queue if that's what they were doing.

The rest of the time pay or edit. Oh well, off to pay.

[stoner3221]

To end speculation the paid review was down for several days due to the merchant account being out of service. Rather then leave everybody hanging we opened the free submission. As for not getting enough paid reviews; I’m the person who does the majority of them within 24 hours. I’ve been spending a lot of 9 and 16-hour days to keep up with them. The statement “paid or not they will be indexed within a few days” is not true at all, though we truly do wish it could be. We have a large backlog of unreviewed sites, many as old as last year. The oldest sites are getting a priority by our editors but it’s a tough job to keep up. Like any human edited volunteer directories, experienced editors are always in need. The best thing for us having the paid review service is the quality of the submissions through this service. I don’t have to sort through a lot of low quality affiliate sites; we are getting good quality submissions to build a quality directory with.

[Mohamed_E]

stoner,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, and many thanks for the update plus added detail!

[Harwich]

It appears now that the only free submission route is to become an editor..... unless I am missing something.

[adamxcl]

I just thought that I'd add that I was a GoGuides editor for a while. I tried to keep a clean, quality section under my control but other more senior editors would transfer bad affiliate sites into it, move them up in rating and knock down or out some real legit, non-affiliate sites. I would try to reject their low quality sites but the higher editors would override it again. Not sure if it was a personal interest in those sites or what, but it got too frustrating to continue as my hard work became pointless.

[cornwall]

adamxcl

I do not think Goguides suffers any more than any other volunteer directory does from editor abuse.

Get more than a couple of hundred editors, and controling abuse becomes almost a full time job for those running the directory.

I believe that you have just been unfortunate in the category you were editing, if abuse was perpetrated from above. Abuse does not appear to be endemic, but the amount of affiliate sites, etc does appear to be higher than either DMOZ or JoeAnt

Your best approach would have been to file a complaint to the top management

[gnikiv]

I agree with cornwall. Did you file a complaint to their Spam Committee? Actually, I believe stoner, in this thread, is their director of that committee.

They can't keep it Spam Free if guides like yourself don't speak up.

[stoner3221]

It’s a difficult task to keep up with spam but we have removed over 11,000 sites so far. Spam is not what it used to be; it’s gone high tech and can get past the inexperienced editor with ease. It used to be very easy to see, they all used affiliate tags in the URL. Now they load in frames and other variations that make them look legit. You really need to know the products or services in your topic in order to know what is and is not spam. The time it takes now to determine if a well-done site suspected of being spam is incredible. I’ve spent over 30 minutes many times on a single site tracking and comparing domain registrations and the products offered. The time and labor involved in keeping up with spam is incredible and probably every directories biggest problem.

[stoner3221]

adamxcl,
One Team Support Editor reviews all the sites sent to the low quality category. She is one of our finest editors and has been with GoGuides since day one. Having one editor review the sites sent to the low quality category makes it consistent as to what is and what is not considered low quality. We don’t have the inconsistencies that many volunteer directories have in this area. If she sent a site back to the category it was because it met submission guidelines 100%. If you were encountering a problem Team Support would have gladly worked with you; that’s what Team Support is for. Considering there are only a few senior editors it should not have been such a problem for you that it could not have been rectified quickly. Your always-welcome back and I will work with you personally to correct any injustices you felt were hampering your editing.

[cornwall]

stoner321

>>Spam is not what it used to be; it’s gone high tech and can get past the inexperienced editor with ease. <<

You might consider "locking" some of the higher spam prevalent categories (eg towards the top of the travel tree, car rental, airline booking systems and the like).

I would agree that you need experienced editors to sniff these out. You do seem to have a problem with these categories that DMOZ and JoeAnt have managed to overcome

I wander by from time to time and drop a spam report, which, to be fair, is usually acted on quickly

[stoner3221]

Cornwall,
Travel and Tourism has always been a troublesome area due to the lack of editors interested in the topic. We now have three very good editors in the topic who have done a significant and still ongoing house cleaning.

[cornwall]

>>We now have three very good editors in the topic who have done a significant and still ongoing house cleaning <<

stoner3221

As that was an invitation, I dropped by, and I have to agree that there have been changes for the better in the top travel categories in GoGuides. I can see that you have ongoing house cleaning of a major order.

If you can keep, and give experience of detecting modern spam methods to, 3 (hopefully honest) editors, then you should crack the problem.

I would still repeat my previous remark about locking certain categories to prevent spam being included. The test of your new system will be in about 3 months time, to see if the spammers have managed to get back in ;)