It has been about three weeks since the directory contest was officially announced. Our Romow directory entered the contest with the DirectoryContest.com listing a few days later, and it has ranked among the top-five consistently since then. As of this posting, it even outranks the official contest site, and show up first at Google for keyword “directorycontest.com.” :)

As the contest hoster described in the announcement, “the goal of this contest is to find the strongest directories which benefit the submitters the most.” If executed right (which I think is quite a challenge), the outcome of such a contest would be extremely useful to all the webmasters out there who are constantly looking to boost their search engine ranking. However, the original goal of this contest can be tarnished by the fact that the contest allows external link building or site-wide linking specifically targeting a contest listing, and by the possibility that such “unnatural” backlink building efforts by directory owners may end up deciding the winners after all. Well, in that sense, I wouldn’t be too proud of our contest ranking if you know what I mean. :) According to directorycontest.com, the reason why they allow link building to contest listings is because they cannot control it. People may build backlinks to their competitor’s listing to make them disqualified. That’s valid concern on their part.

At this point, it is not clear which is the dominant factor in determining the contest rankings: overall strength of a directory, or link building/SEO tricks for a particular contest entry. If the latter is what matters, then who knows? Some aspiring directory owner may buy up PR7/PR8 links to their listing a week before the contest is over, and instantly boost their ranking to the top just in time. Well, snatching $1500 contest prize with $xxx investment in link building is quite good ROI.

The reason we are participating in this contest even with all these concerns and self-criticism is not for cach prize, but simply for the targeted exposure the contest can bring to us. The Romow directory has been heavily promoted and gained significant directory strength. However, it is still a relatively new entrant in directory market, and thus needs a good amount of exposure to targeted audience. DirectoryContest.com is the very first (as far as I know) online contest devoted to ranking directories, and so it is an excellent opportunity to draw webmasters’ attention to our directory (thanks to Mike for hosting the contest!). Even if our directory does not remain on top at the end of contest, we will still be enjoying good exposure while we are seen in the Google’s 1st page until February, and that’s quite an effective marketing campaign that doesn’t need much investment. I will see if there’s any interesting development along the way.

After about three months’ link building efforts, the current status of our Romow Directory is as follows (as of 11/12/06).

• Number of Google-indexed pages: 1,870
  
• Number of backlinks*: 115,179
  
• Number of .edu TLDs backlinks*: 27
  
• SEOmoz’s Page Strength: 4.5 to 5.0 (fluctuate during the day)
• iwebtool’s PageRank Prediction: 7 (6.5) with 66.2% accuracy

* The backlink counts are reported by Yahoo.

Our link building efforts are on-going process. Please stay tuned.

Site of the day:
SEO-friendly phpLD Directory List

The most comprehensive and oldest list of SEO-friendly phpLD directories out there. If you just started a new directory powered by phpLD script, this is the ultimate directory resource site that you do not want to miss. It lists all the phpLD directories for free. So if you run a phpLD directory, this is a chance to get it exposed to search engines, directory submitters and potential customers by listing there at no cost. Note that if your directory is NOT powered by phpLD script, do not bother to submit it as it will be rejected. Again, this offer is only available to phpLD directory owners.

While we were promoting our directory, we came across several directory lists
which show the top ranking directories out there.

Here are some:

ILQ-based directory ranking:
http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/top-web-directories.html

The ranking is based on ILQ (Inbound Link Quality), which is supposed to capture the quality of inbound links from yahoo, dmoz, edu and gov sites. They assign different weights for inbound links from yahoo (1), dmoz (30), edu (45) and gov (67), and then do the weighted sums of all the inbound links. There is some controversy whether we should consider backlinks from edu and gov much more authoritative than others. For example, one can easily obtain backlinks from personal homepages hosted at edu sites.

Seomoz’s page strengh based directory ranking:
http://www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories/

The ranking criteria include a mix of backlink counts/quality, traffic-level, pagerank, domain age, search engine ranking, etc. Combining such multi-dimensional data to calculate meaningful “page strength” is by no means easy. Apparently the page strength result shown are rather sensitive to tweaking factors. Also, some of the factors being used are not a good indicator for page strength. For example, Alexa ranking and domain age may assign unwaranted high strength for those sites hosted at popular web sites as their subdomains (e.g., blogspot.com). Although their attempt to come up with an “unbiased” metric for measuring the importance of a web site is well-received, there seems to be room for improvement.

We are happy to announce our new Romow directory to the world. Many directory owners make a common mistake by stopping developing their directories after the grand opening day, and hoping that the value of their directories will continue to grow over time. Creating a directory with some nice custom template/logo and well-laid out categories is only the first step. A “quality” directory needs constant care and development afterwards, in terms of maintaining editorial integrity, keeping directory listings up-to-date, developing backlinks, and making various other marketing and promotional efforts. Having said that, we can assure you that our Romow directory will grow into one of few “quality” directories out there. So stay tuned!