The lost sense of web directories, backlinks and pagerank
August 28th, 2009
For several years, I wasted a few minutes from time to time to suggest our community at the open directory project (DMOZ) but as you can imagine, I had no luck. I am not a dumb person, I know how an appropriate title and description have to look like, our community is well known and therefore is a very good candidate for the directory. I even applied for becoming a volunteer editor of the german WWW/Communities category a year or two ago because I thought they might need help there – but I had no luck, too. So, what person do I have to sleep with or give a bunch of dollars to get my site listed there? Is this the sense of a web directory that praises itself to only contain quality links? There is so much garbage in there but our quality community is rejected. Maybe it is time to burn the ODP because it did not serve any purpose for a long time. This efficiently prevents us from being listed where our competitors already are.
Howevery, I am still looking around to get some backlinks. While roaming around the web I stumbled upon several (50+) much smaller web directories and added our community there. Most of them accepted the entry, some bugged me for a backlink, others seem to be dead and a few do not even allow new links to be added. The problem seems to be, that Google does not care of this webdirectories and the links listed there – I assume they filtered them out already. I basically agree with Google’s decision but this becomes another factor for us: We do not have the same chances today like our competitors had in the past.
Another reason why there are so few links to our sites is that our community is its own litte ecosystem (with blogs, profile etc.), so that there is hardly a reason for someone to link to it from an external ressource. Members find anything they need inside and the only noteworthy intersection are “people finders” where links unfortunately cannot be seen by search robots because they are “login only” or do not even convert URLs to links. This efficiently prevents us from getting the rank we deserve.
In addition Microsoft’s Bing crowns it all by neigher understanding our sitemap files that are a perfect implementation of the sitemaps standards nor crawling our sites adequately. There are about 200 pages listed in Bing for “rockz.com” of about 1.000.000, for “schlach.com” there even seem to be some hundreds of sitemap files mistakenly indexed as real content instead of any content. This is so ridiculous and prevents us from being found by customers at all.
To cut the long story short: It seems that SEOs overwrought the search engine operators for years and caused a total overregulation so that today’s websites do not have the ghost of a chance to catch up to others that already exploited the possibilities in the past. The only factors for getting a good rank today are having a cash cow or friends somewhere in the press business.
Knowing this you can skip all the unnessecary parts I have been through. Go and invest your time into something valuable, go and find the cow, good luck!
Chrome – Pointless leecher?
September 3rd, 2008
I think you already read enough about the new Google Browser somewhere else. So additionally, these are just my two cents:
As you may know, I’m sometimes limited to an ISDN internet connection (64kbit/s). This is why I just cannot use chrome because it downloads (or uploads) permanently. I’ve been running it for about two hours now and there still nothing changed. It also shows network usage “Not available” for the browser component.
I somewhat expected that a google browser would transfer various (…) data in the background, but this is tough ;-). No idea what data is transfered here – currently the problem is that data is transfered so that my internet connection is unusable.
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