I am beginning to get an eerie feeling when I visit social bookmarking sites. The feeling is part nostalgia, part de ja vu, and part dread. It’s actually more than just a feeling. When SMO Bookmarking in Delicious, Magnolia or Mister Wong, I hear a voice that whispers: remember me… It’s sort of the same sense you get when you hear a new tune on the radio and recognize the guitar chord progression–”Hey that’s “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynard Skynard, but the band doesn’t even realize that they have subconsciously plagiarized those chords. They think they wrote the melody themselves!

Once upon a time, there only a few web directories. Moment of silence for Yahoo, DMOZ, Zeal (I miss Zeal), et. al. Then, over the years, we all know what happened. Directory scripts proliferated. Submission software blossomed.  These and the other original directories that remain have all been spammed into commercialization (paid directories), dormancy or death. I shut down submissions to my own directories quite a while back. Then Google deprecated web directories in search results.

Social bookmarking sites have cool features that traditional web directories never really incorporated. There are many differences. These are two very high level differences I see:

• Community  - I like seeing what my friends are bookmarking. I like adding friends to my profile.
• Organization - I am all but done with browser bookmarking. It’s unwieldy. Delicious will probably be around longer than my current PC hard-drive that I didn’t back up. I like tagging. I like checking out the highest rated sites.

Now, here we are in the Web 2.0 era with AJAXy social bookmarking sites showing off their frontends: clean rounded corners, gradient reflective logos, speech bubbles, rss icons like freshly waxed aerodynamic sports cars. And, unlike in the directory days, they are offering you more than a link. They offer a network of friends. They offer friends’ links to scour, bookmark and improve your Internet life. They give users a reason to come back (other than to submit another link, haha). But, look underneath the surface. Do you see what I see?

• Submit/Add Link = Save/Post
• Categories = Tags
• Comments = Notes
• Recent = Newest Links
• Auto Submit = Import XML File

Do you get the same eerie feeling?

Are user submitted buttons disappearing from the Google Toolbar Button Gallery? Old categories have been removed. Links to author sites appear incorrect, broken…

When Google announced the Toolbar Button feature last year, it was too cute of a gimmick to pass up. I made a some custom buttons and found them quite handy to have sitting up on my toolbar. Not only that, but I made a few for SEO clients that resulted in extra traffic and even a few leads–yes leads, believe it or not.

According to the Google Toolbar Submit Button page, you can

“create a custom button XML file, upload it to your website and use this form to tell us about it. We’ll review it to make sure it meets our Editorial Guidelines, then display it in the Button Gallery for others to enjoy.”

I did this and my button soon appeared in the Google Button Gallery. I became quite endeared to the whole idea of Toolbar Buttons after seeing these PR 4/5 gallery pages with my buttons reported as backlinks by Google.

Like myself, most users who took the time to create and submit a Google custom Toolbar Button and even entire Toolbar Button sites didn’t expect any guarantees that their buttons wouldn’t be discarded. I did expect them to remain intact longer than a year. Think of how long the ancient Google Directory has been with us. Yet, on approximately April 30, 2007, the date iGoogle launched, entire categories of buttons started disappearing. Specifically, these categories were dropped:

• Blogs
• Education
• Entertainment
• Jobs
• Local
• Other
• Reviews
• Search
• Shopping
• Software
• Travel

Comparison of the old Google Toolbar Button Gallery with the new

The new menu (right) looks very similar to the menu that appears on iGoogle under “Add stuff to your homepage.”

Where are the buttons previously listed in the above categories? They are viewable only by searching the gallery for the specific site name. Worst of all, the buttons appear adjacent to broken and incorrect links back to the authors’ sites:

Feedster shows geocities.com as official site

GameSpot official site shows as i.i.com.com

Looks like TechCrunch has been acquired by a cable company

So what are Toolbar Button fans supposed to do? Do we resubmit or move on? Is Google discarding user buttons or should we assume this is a temporary glitch?

Update: I am seeing the old categories and buttons returning to life in the Google Toolbar Button Gallery! Looks like a happy ending.
Update: Oops, now the old categories are gone again. Broken links appear fixed though.

Before search, were directories. Intenet users instinctively know this, but a lot of us webmasters are still not so sure. Thanks to a few well coded and low priced directory scripts, there seems to be no shortage of new general web directories appearing. Most of them seem to mirror the taxonomy of DMOZ except they have only a fraction of the listings. There are even entire forums and blogs devoted to building and promoting web directories.  From the user perspective, I think there is very little debate that directories resemble anything like the wave of the future.

To support my point, I’ll ask a question:

“When was the last time you opened your browser and visited a web directory to find anything?”

The exception might be niche directories, perhaps even directories with feeds or user generated content or some social media functionality.

Any objections? I rest my case.

Now, what about the usefulness of web directories for webmasters? What about the content building and organic search benefits? A quote from Nick Wilson stuck in my mind so much that I went back and Googled it up:

Many years ago, webmasters worked out that owning directories was a great way to give yourself links, get free content in way of submissions and great revenue by putting affiliate links dressed up as real listings on the pages. Google didn’t like this much, and nowadays, most directories are worthless in terms of link value because of this.

Google appears to have done some filtering of directories, souring the flavor of their link juice. You may have noticed some paid directories losing their PageRank altogether. A lot of these directories have PageRank on their main page, but when you drill down to a random category, the page is not cached by Google. Having your link on a page like that doesn’t excite many SEO’s. Subterranean billboard advertising probably wouldn’t be so great either.

Despite the improvements in search algorithms, I still see some value in running web directories, especially niche directories, if you can keep the content robust, unique and well edited and the listings of high quality. That’s not always easy. One of the most boring tasks a webmaster can perform is shuffling through the haystack of daily directory submissions to find the one guy’s a good needle.

Enough of me trying to answer the question. Let’s hear from the Google Webmaster Guidelines:

Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

How do you spend your Sunday afternoons? Not long ago, I’d reserved the day to perform some webmasterly duties I’d been putting off and unleash some fresh creative energy upon the design of a new site or two. I had struck a bargain with my wife that she could have Saturday if I could have Sunday. Saturday would involve us driving around town to fulfill various commercial tasks she had prioritized (shopping) and which I would commit to enjoy. Sunday, oh Sunday. I could do whatever I wanted: political TV shows, pc gaming, heavy metal music and of course making my web sites better!

I decided on performing maintenance tasks first. Later I could do the fun creative stuff like playing around with new graphics or design for web sites. I checked the Clickfire Webmaster Directory and saw that it contained about 150 link submissions, all of which were spam (I’ll never undertand people who see a positive value in spam). I’d guess that at least 90% of directory submissions received are either spam or submitted in blatant disrespect of the very reasonable and modest guidelines for adding a link. Directory scripts have become so sophisticated and feature rich that webmasters can instantly approve or disapprove large numbers of links. So, as I had done many times before, I would select all the evil spam links and laughingly whisk them away to meet their fate in the depths of the recycling bin. The only problem is that this time, instead of selecting “Delete,” I selected the other option. Can you guess what that was? APPROVE!

The very spamnable thing that every webmaster loathes from the depth of his soul, I had just allowed to appear on my site: V|agra, p()ker, p[]rn, etc. After the smoke and tears had cleared and my wife had calmed me down enough to realize that there was still a reason to live, I logged onto phpMyAdmin and began squashing all the ill-approved sites. Throughout the process, I lost a few good sites but managed to get rid of the offending ones. This took one to two hours and my nerves were wrecked for the rest of the day. The moral of this story is be careful where you click!

It seems that every webmaster site has added a directory these days. A quality directory can serve as a way to get to know other webmasters, build links, and get content for your site. A little over a year ago, I added a directory of webmaster links at Clickfire. I started with several categories which I thought were important to webmasters like web design, scripts, web hosting, search engines, etc. and added more over time. I added a few links to sites I like, promoted it a bit, then sat back to see what kind of webmaster resource links visitors would submit. I’d typically sign in a few times per week to delete spam and approve the good submissions. Read more of this post »