Archive for 'B.E.P. Web Directory'

My web directory is now closed. It will not be reopened as I feel that my time is best focused elsewhere. Additionally, I believe directories have very little role in Today’s way of searching for for what we are looking for. Their usefulness has ended as search engines have evolved and results have become very relevant.

Frankly, it is quicker to type a search string in to Google, Yahoo!, Live, Ask or whatever search engine you prefer and (usually) find what you want within a few seconds than spending 5 minutes or so browsing through an often spam-filled directory.

After being very busy of late, I’ve finally got around to writing the second review. This time it is about Bramblewood Bed & Breakfast. It is the website for a delightful looking B & B in Drymen, Scotland.

Not only is the site well-designed, visually pleasing and an interesting to read, but there are also some very lovely photos in the gallery. As a lover of beautiful countryside, I certainly would enjoy visiting there. I hope that my next holiday is in Scotland…

It’s a shame that there are not more sites of this calibre out there.

Bramblewood B & B can be found listed in: Travel » Hotels.

After many days of trying, I got phpLinkDirectory 3.1 working as I want (or so I hope). Definitely, 3.1 is a big improvement over 2.X but there are several issues to consider (such as the 404 pages not working correctly, which has many repercussions, and nofollow for submit.php on category pages, so as to avoid spamming search engines) and definitely it’s well worth spending time testing and fixing any issues which arise.

The administration interface is definitely a big improvement and makes life a bit easier when dealing with submissions, although there are perhaps other areas which need more attention (such as the forum, some of the posts on there are very hostile).

Read more…

Unfortunately, I had to temporarily close the submissions page due to a high volume of sites to review. It was partly made easy due to keyword stuffing in descriptions/titles by very many sites.

Fortunately, I’ve been able to review and accept 332 so far, just 420 to go. I’ve flagged a few for write-up in my blog … so an extra backlink for 2 for those genuinely interesting and/or original sites.

Well, back to checking through the remaining 420..

After going through lots of spammy sites, I thought I’d finally found another great site worth writing about but unfortunately not. Perhaps it was pedantic of me, but the description (submitted to my directory, not on his/her site) was heavily stuffed with keywords, so heavily stuffed that there weren’t even spaces between words. Well, I’m not providing correction services (other than sometimes changing category) so that one was thrown in to the trashcan.

Can this keyword stuffing do any favours in search engines? I can’t imagine so and I truly hope not. Why do it when a site is so great in the first place (it was a sports blog)? It’s also potentially detrimental to any future business for that site, too.


Read more…