HUMAN EDITED

Good quality web directories are edited by human beings who will review your site submission for appropriateness, according to the individual directory’s guidelines, and who may edit the site’s title, description and placement, if indicated. Generally speaking, the better web directories do not guarantee that your site will be listed, although some will refund the submission fees from sites that are not accepted into the directory, while others may allow webmasters to substitute an acceptable site for one that was found to be unacceptable, for some reason. Others will simply reject the submission.

Unfortunately, you cannot take every web directory at its word that it is human edited, as many of those that claim to be human edited are not, as a look through the directory’s listings will indicate. Many web directories will claim to be human edited because someone reviews, approves or rejects submitted site listings, but if it is to be done well, the job goes far beyond that.

Ideally, when a web site listing is submitted to a directory, an editor will review the listing to see whether or not it qualifies for listing according to the guidelines of the web directory, which will vary from one directory to another. Many web directories will not accept gambling or adult sites, for example.

The editor will then check to see that the web site has been submitted to the appropriate category, as many web masters and submission services will submit sites to higher level categories that may have a higher page rank but are not the most correct placement for the site listing. If the editor determines that the web site was submitted to an inappropriate category, some editors may reject the listing, but most will simply move it to the appropriate category.

The editor will also review the title and description to ensure that they adequately describe the web site and that they meet the guidelines of the web directory, making changes as indicated. Although you may lose some of the keywords that you had hoped to have in your web site description, overall these are good things, and in many cases you will find that the site description has been improved.

If I see a gambling site, a Viagra site, a mortgage company site, and a California real estate company all in the same category, I can be fairly certain that no rational human being has reviewed these listings for correct placement, and I would hesitate to add my web site listing to the mix.

In my opinion, human editors are a necessary component of a reliable, useful web directory, because they perform many tasks that cannot be effectively automated. Among the tasks that human editors should perform are the approval or rejection of site link submissions, based on a criteria that is designed to build a useful directory. Human editors should review the content of web sites in order to determine their suitability for inclusion in the directory, rather than simply accepting anything that someone is willing to pay for. Editors should review submitted information, such as titles and descriptions, to prevent spam, keyword stuffing, or overly promotional language. Human editors are needed to seed the directory with worthwhile listings, thus providing content and encouraging web site owners to want their listings included, as well.

Human editors should review existing content in order to remove or replace dead links, and to move or remove those whose contents may have changed considerably, rendering them no longer appropriate for the category in which they are in. While automated processes may be used to remove dead links from public view, human editors are needed in order to determine whether the problem is a domain or URL change, in which case it can be corrected, or to replace dead sites with live ones having similar content, thus ensuring that categories are not left empty.

Human editors should be involved in restructuring the web directory’s taxonomy in order to accommodate the growth or diminution of directory content, maintaining the relevancy and usefulness of the directory.

While the value of a web directory listing today lies more in its value in enhancing a web site’s placement in external search engines than in the amount of organic traffic the directory is likely to send to listed web sites, I am of the opinion that web directories that are structured and maintained so that they can be easily navigated will also be more effectively spidered by external search engines.

Although often faulty, search engine algorithms are intended to give priority to web sites that are of good quality, so when web sites, or web directories, are of good quality and relevant to what the searcher is looking for, they are more apt to be found, even without employing complicated or expensive SEO tricks.

WHY ANOTHER WEB DIRECTORY REVIEW SITE?

Because most of the ones that I have seen are useless, either because they were put up for the sole purpose of promoting one particular web directory and are, thus, misleading, or because they haven’t been updated in years, and no longer represent the true status of the web directories being reviewed.

Also, to be honest, I have worked with web directories for the past several years so I thought that, as long as I am looking at web directories, I may as well review them.

There are hundreds, and perhaps even thousands, of web directories on the Internet and, although there are some very good ones, the vast majority of them are junk. There are also dozens of web site submission services, many of which will take your money and do nothing positive for your web site placement or traffic. Many, in fact, have the potential of harming your web site placement.

When a web site submission service promises to submit your site to dozens or hundreds of web directories, beware, as there aren’t more than about ten that you would want to have your web site listed in, if that.

A mistake that many people make, including myself, is one of impatience, and an over-emphasis on such matters as search engine optimization and page rank, at a time when the focus should be on content.

Content and time will often bring about the appropriate results by themselves. Otherwise, once you have provided the content, there are search engine optimization steps that can be taken, and web directories should not be left out of any SEO scheme.