directory

A good idea at the right time or another startup launched into Internet obscurity? You can be the judge of that, but as a human who eats, I like the idea of Bite2Eat.com. For example, I can bring up a nice, extensive list of restaurants in the Lexington area, complete with addresses and phone numbers. And that’s useful enough, a quick and easy restaurant directory.

Web directories don't exactly have the reputation of being helpful resources for finding information. Most have become endless pits of links, and wading through them to find anything useful is next to impossible. Then there are the human-edited ones that tend to be more useful, but are aimed more at the submitter promoting their business than they really are towards the user who is there to find information. Often times these directories offer paid links, further proving that they are really there for promotional purposes.

I know a segment of my readers are sick to death with anything to do with Google PageRank updates, and I haven't even bothered mentioning the most recent update up until now… there wasn't really anything newsworthy in it.

The iGoogle gadget directory has been completely redesigned.

The recent slap a handful of directories experienced was unaccompanied by an explanation from Google, though the general consensus (maybe) was that Google's webspam team was sending a message. Weeks later, Murdok has wrangled a response from Google's Webmaster Central team – sort of.

Algorithmic flux or selective penalization? Nobody's sure and nobody that can answer is talking so far, but paid link directories have been plummeting in Google search results. Many are not ranking for their own business name, according to reports, even though webmasters have not received penalty notices.

When I first read last week that Wordpress had launched an official plugins directory I was excited. There are lots of good plugins out there that are not in any sort of searchable database other than a search engine. However, the Wordpress plugin directory isn’t living up to my excitations yet.

Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal has written a post on measuring the value of directory links.