The Website Directory Business

The website directory has a long history on the internet preceding even search engines as a mode of finding websites. Many fine older directories are still in operation, directories like Yahoo, DMOZ, BOTW, JoeAnt, GoGuides, Business.com and Skaffe.com. Some of the webs great directories however have succumbed to poor management and the inability to support their bloated operating costs.

A good example was the Go.com Directory. Its sole means of financing operation was banner advertising. When banner advertising sales took a dive in what was called the dot-com crash that started in early 2000 Go’s parent company Disney closed its doors leaving thousands of volunteer editors who had built the high quality directory rather upset. Several of the editors went on to start their own directories. GoGuides and JoeAnt are most notable but former Go.com editors also built Skaffe and Wow Directory. All are still in operation and strong directories today.

The most successful and most popular directory is the DMOZ directory. DMOZ is a totally volunteer edited directory run by a little mafia team know as META editors. It’s a very antiquated and poorly operated directory but it is unquestionably a fine example of a quality internet resource. Their editors have done a good job of searching and adding some of the webs finest websites.  

Several directories hold the title of strongest directories with a very high volume of traffic and millions of searches every month. These directories include Business.com, Yahoo, and BOTW.

Directories have changed a great deal over the years and some offer a lot of different but related services like blog and article directories. Others offer entertainment and news services, but the biggest changes have been in the directory scripts. Editing in a directory is now fast and efficient and spam control is almost totally automated. Scripts have also become much more search engine friendly and responsible directory operators have search engine optimized the directory for easy crawling by the search engines.

It is unfortunate that directories have become abused. I have proudly spent most of my life developing and building some of the webs finest directories with years of work involved in each one. Today anybody who can install a free script on cheap hosting can claim to own a directory. Most are actually just link farms with intentions of selling links to webmasters to manipulate Google’s page ranking but they have truly stunk up what was a proud profession. Now Google is penalizing the directories who have fed them high quality data for many years, essentially biting the hands that have fed them for many years because of the abusers.

Like many times over the years quality directories shall endeavor to prevail yet another tough time. Myself at least I hope that Google can find a better way of protecting its database from link farm directories then punishing all directories.