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Is it necessary to have an actual (html) email link on your site for SEO purposes or is an email form good enough? I removed all the email links from my sites and replaced them with a form because of spammers. It's turned out pretty good for now. Will directory editors reject sites with no email links on them? I read this somewhere. I'm just curious as to what others opinions are on this topic.
Thanks,
DJWil
OTOH, if the site is both borderline and anonymous, I personally tend to delete rather than list. IMO, an email address is the vaguest form of identification; by itself it would add little to the openness of a site. If the site includes someone's name, an address, and a phone number, then it has established a solid basis of legitimacy.
As a consumer (not editor), I wouldn't dream of buying anything from or giving any information to a site which does not plainly include identifying and verifiable information. My gut-feeling reaction to anonymous forms is "crook". Presence of only phone number and/or email address does not change my attitude. But hey, that's just me.
-- Rich
If you are concerned with spammers, consider putting on the site something like "you can e-mail the webmaster at someone <at> example <dot> com."
For highly technical informational sites, an identifiable authoritative source is sometimes the difference between a listing and no listing. "Drinking 22 ounces of pale lager per hour keeps you from dying of a heart attack." Who said? How do they know? Would you trust them with your life? Why should you care what their opinion of nontraditional diet is? Would it make a difference that their medical training consisted of failing a half-semester of introductory voodoo at the Southeastern Angolan Medical and Undertakers' School?
For a personal, recreational, or artistic site, the reviewer probably won't notice whether the owner is identified. I don't care who scanned all of Bulwar-Lytton's novels into HTML format; I don't care who took all those pictures of winter foliage at Petty Gulch State Park; I don't care whose collection of Troglodytic Coleoptera is described -- the electrophotomicroscopic views of dissected butterfly sonar receptors are pretty cool regardless.
Both of my (hobby) sites were listed in ODP with little delay. Neither has an explicit email address anywhere. In both cases anyone with any knowledge of how the major ISPs work could easily deduce an email address from the URL (my.isp.net/me or my.other.isp.net/~me). I suspect, though, that the fact that they were hobby sites led to them being listed with no concern about who I might be.
But the OP specifically mentioned "an actual (html) email link on your site for SEO purposes or is an email form good enough". An actual HTML e-mail link on the site is absolutely useless in terms of *identifying* a person. All it takes to get an e-mail address is to sign up for one at Hotmail, and voila. To identify a person would involve things like real name, street address, verifiable agent identification, etc.
As such, I can see no reason why the presence or lack of an actual HTML e-mail link on the site should be a factor when it comes to an ODP listing.
