What criteria do you use to accept a link submission?

[tina]

I am interested to know what types of criteria other users of eSyndiCat employ when accepting links into their directories?

For example as a strict rule I won't accept links to illegal, gambling, or drug related sites. Still haven't decided about adult related sites, however I haven't really received any submissions on those yet. As far as acceptable categories I won't accept sites that employ pop up ads or redirect to a different address than the one submitted. I also tend to not approve sites that use Yahoo or Hotmail email addresses unless the site appears to be of a very high quality.

I've also experienced several situations where a group of submissions will show up at the same time, so fairly obvious its the same person, for three or four sites that are all very similar yet with different domain names. I'll tend to maybe approve one or two of them and not the others. What do some of you do in those situations?

I also frequently receive submissions that are clearly for the wrong category. I usually approve those and just move them to their correct location. Of course that creates extra work for me. All of my links are free and I do not require reciprocal links its optional, which I have yet to receive a legitimate one. So the thought has crossed my mind that perhaps I should be a little more strict on wrong category submissions. What do others do in that area?

Be well,
Tina

[snerd]

Hi Tina,

I don't have time at the momemt to answer your questions, but wanted to let you know that you have alignment issues on your directory's main page in Firefox. It's all overlapping onto and over the categories. You may want to see if this thread helps with a fix:

http://www.esyndicat.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1399&highlight=firefox

[tina]

Thank you for the heads up :)

[subseo]

Through the time I have developed a highly refined sense and I usually just accept them based on a gut feeling.

Translated it means that I don't accept:
- extremely bad design
- content scrapers
- built for Adsense
- built by marketers (eg. blogs with reviews of treadmills, blogs containing stuff written by third party which is copied from article directories, etc. Includes those one-page websites with those screens-long snake-oil ad copies)
- bad content (stuff written by hired writers which is mostly nonsense stuff)
- wrongly written description (eg. just keywords, or time sensitive material, or prices)
- wrongly written title (large chain of keywords, #1, tricks to get higher in the queue, etc.)
- sites that are not indexed by Google but are not completely new (ie. banned sites)
- stuff I don't like, and illegal stuff


etc.

I also have few spam filters that automatically delete stuf from people operating networks of websites, etc.

[Bryan Ex]

Great question Tina. Admittedly I won't be able to provide you with specific advice as my sites are adult in nature and as such cater to a much different market along with having to deal with different problems. To answer your question though, I would say base your submission guidelines on two factors 1) to reduce or address problem links you receive and 2) to give direction to your overall directory.

Problems will appear over time so this will be a work in progress for you. You may have people submit sites hosted by a free service or that don't have a proper domain name (IP address only) that are here today and gone tomorrow creating maintenance work to remove dead links all the time. You may get people that submit every page on their site individually, feed your traffic into pop-ups, have really poorly designed sites, or sites with little "substance" as examples. Basically write your rules as you go.

The second part should be based on what type of content you want to link to. Will it be specific to a certain topic or theme or just open to general links? While we all want directories full of content, don't get too caught up in collecting links just for the sake of collecting. Keep in mind that whomever you link to... YOU are sending YOUR traffic too and it can often reflect on your site's ethics and professionalism.

In a nutshell, while in the starting stages leave it open while you are getting started and then develop your guidelines as you identify the things you don't want to deal with or associate your site with.

[Simon Gooffin]

Hi,
Really good question.. Before we accepted sites with Google PageRank only. The higher PageRank a site has the better positions we assign to it. But now we do not exchange links in this way. There are many new sites that are really good and in most cases they even better than old ones (good design, frequently updated content, easy to navigate, etc.) But they do not have any pagerank due to their online age. So why should we refuse in approval? Sometimes it's better to have a good directory with really relevant content than a storage of old ugly pages, IMHO