We offer free submissions and because of this we get vast numbers per day, yet people don’t follow the simplest rule and then if we discard the listing because it is incorrect they complain bitterly, however if we rewrite their text so that it follows our guidelines then they complain bitterly that we changed it.
We ask that people use the company name as the title of their listing, we don’t mind a couple of keywords, but a quick look at the review queue shows about 50% of the pending free submissions are submitted with keyword stuffed titles.
Some of these sites are submitted by so called professional SEO or submission companies which have almost certainly been paid by their clients to submit the site to us. The client is probably blissfully unaware that they are paying and getting nothing in return.
We get submissions with a description with 3 or 4 words repeated over and over again to make it meet the minimum word requirement? This just defies belief, if it was my site I’d want people to see my listing with well written text as it shows I’m professional and not some 12yr old trying to run a business out of my dads basement.
Are people really so stupid that they think that we don’t check what is submitted to us and that we will list any keyword stuffed rubbish they care to submit?
We want the web directory to exist for many years to come, one way to do this is to list quality sites with good descriptive text. Categories full of keyword stuffed entries will not help in this endeavour, sure it might help the listed site with good back link text right up until the directory is dropped from search engines for being a spam filled waste of space.
If people used some common sense they’d realise that they should be helping to make the directory as good as possible, because if the directory is good it will attract not just spiders but real humans. After all it’s humans that actually buy goods not spiders.
To be able to offer free submissions and keep up with the flow we have just seconds to look at the submitted text and decide if it’s worth taking the time to review the site for inclusion or if to discard the submission and move to one where the site owner took the time to submit properly.
While paid submitters sometimes assume that rules don’t apply to them and will spam fields, we do have the time to rewrite the text to be suitable. Therefore should we simply say enough is enough and go paid only thus people will loose out on free promotion of their site all because they couldn’t be bothered.
When you talk to submitters that have done it incorrectly you often get replies such as “I don’t care about your categories I just want PR”, and it is this mindset that seems to dominate. In the case of the submitters ignoring category structure what they are forgetting is that search engines do like relevancy so if we did accept it as-is it really wouldn’t be doing them any favours.
I think the problem stems from people just looking at directories as a back link and they must get as many links as they can.
This seems to be backed up be the fact that we allow listed sites to push short news items to show on our home page and in the archive, however it’s not a permanent link so web masters dismiss it. What they have forgotten is that we have tens of thousands of visitors per month so displaying their news on the directory makes it visible to all these potential buyers. At the moment we don’t even charge for this!
Another directory owner once said to me we shouldn’t be complaining about our submitters but rather educating them? The problem is how do you educate submitters when they can’t or just won’t read the simplest rule?
