Getting a link from a big directory like Dmoz, as you know, is hit and miss; most people say submit your site and forget it. However, loads of webmasters are desperate and salivating for that precious Dmoz link, but it’s quite rare they get it.
Awesome marketing for any website is having people talk about it. Dmoz themselves have a secret plan for making you talk about them. They do this by purposely declining countless numbers of website submissions and ruffling many feathers amongst the webmaster community. Dmoz are irritating everyone so much that there are hundreds, if not thousands of unhappy people complaining on their blogs, forums and websites; moaning like hell about how their sites are not getting listed in Dmoz, how the directory is corrupt, with dodgy editors and a clicky Ol’Boys Club who favourite their own sites. Thus, ironically this is excellent ongoing marketing for them, it costs zip and it acquires a hell of a lot of backlinks, making Dmoz more and more authoritative!
Directories which charge huge review fees can use a similar strategy. If a person pays $300 and has their site rejected, they are going to complain about it on the web somewhere, probably with a nice valuable backlink; again this is free marketing. It doesn’t make the directory look too bad either because they can just say that the site rejected was not of a high enough standard.
This post just shows one example of the many different ways to get people talking about your site (and in this case it’s certainly dishonest).
Please note: this post is not intended to inspire webmasters with ideas for starting dodgy directories!
1 Comments until now.
I think if paid directories adopt the marketing strategy of dmoz, then they may get so much negative publicity that webmaster will refrain from spending even a dollar on them let alone mighty 300. However enforcing editorial decisions strongly is a good sign of a quality directory both for users and google.
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