Webmaster Directory - One Year Later

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.

I just checked and saw that there are over 1100 links in the directory! That means that there are an extra 1100 search engine friendly pages linking to other pages on Clickfire (actually more incuding categories and comment pages). Traffic has increased and search rankings for the keywords that I target have improved with some exceptions. I’m probably giving way too much credit to the directory and ignoring the other stuff I’ve done to get traffic. There are actually so many link directories cropping up that there is speculation that Google has devalued their weight in rankings. But, I’d have to say that I’m glad I took the time to keep it going.

The neat thing about running a directory is that others actually add content to your site in the form of a link, title, and description of the features their site offers. You give them the exposure and link and you get content for your own visitors. Visitors help you do the work. You approve only the sites that you want included in your directory. There are several good directory scripts available on the Internet. Some of these scripts are free or have a functional, but scaled down free version. HotScripts.com is a great repository to find and compare such scripts. The Clickfire Webmaster Links Directory was created with a script called WSN Links. If you own or know of a great webmaster site, please send it through.