Internet Guide/Web Directory
About 10 years ago the internet was still fresh and very new, every day there were new innovating website started, in those days search engines were not very present on the internet except for Altavista. The search technology was not as sophpisticated as it is today therefore search engines had difficulties to keep up with indexing the new websites created every day.The search engine spiders mainly looked at the meta tags of a certain webpage and had not many other techniques to rank a website/webpage in a search query. A web directory would be something like the yellowpages where websites could be listed within in category topic in order for visitors to easily find websites qualified within a category topic.
Therefore a web directory would be the perfect solution as an internet guide to show the surfer a good list of websites. When a new website is created it was submitted to the directory in the topic of the theme of the website and a editor would review the website and if the quality of that website was good enough the website would be placed in the web directory. One of the first large setup web directories was dmoz.org, it is based on vollentairs editors to review the websites. Every editor has it own specific categories to manage in order to maintain the same review quality for the category. Quickly dmoz became the largest human edited web directory, with over 100,000 category topics in many different countries, a very useful internet resource where surfers are able to find quality internet websites. It’s possible to get listed at dmoz.org but at the moment there are long waiting queues for website reviews. Visit the dmoz website for more information, or go to the dmoz forums, resource-zone.com.
Quickly after dmoz started Yahoo! started a similiar directory aside from their search engine. Yahoo! offered the same as dmoz, a large web directory for people to find websites. The only difference with dmoz was that Yahoo! directory is a paid web directory based on a recurring fee. With Yahoo! Directory it is possible to get listed for free but it’s only available for non-profit organisations, visit the Yahoo! directory for more information on this topic.
Because of several facts with the web directories as mentioned above, like a high price or very hard to get in the directories, webmasters started creating smaller general topic web directories. Examples web directories in the the early days web direcotries are Site-Sift and Bluefind both of those directories gained a lot of attention. Bluefind was managed by John Scott of V7N, a well known webmaster who nowadays operates the popular forum and directory at V7N network and Stuart McHenry from Site-Sift Directory who both claim they started the directory because they dissagreed with the way dmoz is operated.
At the time of this writing John Scott wrote an article about the early days of his web directories were he stated that he made over USD50.000 a month with Bluefind and Sevenseek. After a year or so bluefind got delisted from Google search engine for buying links mainly for getting higher google pagerank with advertising at internet.com. At the moment the domain has been transferred and it’s presently known as bluefind.org. Also the site-sift directory got delisted for buying text links at advertising at o’reilly.com. Site-Sift was reinstated in the google index and is still a quality web directory, Stuart McHenry decided to create a free directory script that is available for download at the Site-Sift website.
Since the early days many directories have been created very since and some became highly respected directories, like Botw, JoeAnt, WowDirectory and Skaffe. Botw was originally a award website but some years ago it was converted to a web directory. JoeAnt and Skaffe are both web directories that are both based on volluntairs. WowDirectory is operated by Bruce Stone a well expierenced webmaster and recently he added WowArticleDirectory to his complete and high quality web directory.
Not only is a web directory useful for a internet surfer to find a website within a category topic, it can be a very useful tool for webmasters to get inbound links to website to own or manage. Most search engines like Google or Yahoo base some of the ranking criteria of a website within the search engine position by the number of backlinks to that website. In general the more backlinks to the website with a specific anchor text the higher the rankings. When submitting a website to a web directory the link provided from the directory can count as a backlink to the website or webpage.