Well…it’s been a while since the last BR update.

A few inactive directories removed, a few new ones added to the list. Will start promoting Bidilicious soon and hopefuly we can make it the best bidding directories list out there.

There has been a spate of threads started recently at Digital Point forums regarding “Authority” web directories as seen by Google.

These postings relate to the fact that Google has assigned a varying number of “Site Links” to the web site when it appears in the search engines results.

There has been a long running debate among web masters as to whether these site links mean that Google considers the web site to be an authoritative web site on it’s particular subject. In the past I would have agreed with this assumption because there were only limited web sites where these site links would appear and for the most part they really were considered to be an authority and not just by Google.

However the large influx of web sites, not just web directories; which now have these site links appearing in the search engine’s results leads me to change my opinion. It has now become common to find them when searching for any company which has been on the Internet for a reasonable period of time.

I personally think this is a great move from Google, if I am looking for a product from a particular company and I enter this companies name into Google. Instead of just hitting the homepage of that company and trying to find the product there is a good chance that one of the site links will take me directly to what I was looking for.

Sadly, I went through the top 15-20 bidding directories listed here at Bidilicious and none of them are yet to receive the benefits of the site links, but hopefully in time we will start to see a few!

Yesterday Jeff from Aviva Directory posted on his blog about how you can get your Google rankings back. This post relates primarily to the large number of web directories and bidding directories which are currently suffering from a Google penalty.

Now I say that he may be a little premature for three reasons.

1. Google is currently in the process of updating backlinks and PR and all indications shows that Aviva (and many other penalized directories) are about to have their PR dropped to 0.

2. Aviva Directory has certainly regained it’s site links and does indeed now appear first for the search term “aviva directory” which is a tell tale sign of a directory being under a penalty. However it still doesn’t rank first for long tail keyphrases which it did prior to the original penalty being implemented. It is gaining ground but it is not where it once was.

3. Jeff states in his post that he has yet to file a reinclusion request with Google and I am doubtful that they will lift a penalty without manual review (something which Jeff also states). Given the amount of web sites which Google has applied penalties to, I am not convinced that they manually review without a reinclusion request being presented.

Despite my views above, I am both pleased and grateful that Jeff took the time out to post his actions with regards to this penalty so that others who were affected could learn from his experience. I sincerely wish Jeff and his family well with their endeavors to get Aviva back to it’s former status.

Now to go through some of the points he raised and how it may apply to the bidding directory scene:

1. Paid Links - I think this is a given that Google has now acted and many have now learned their lesson that if they want Google rankings they just cant use this method anymore.

2. Sponsoring Templates - This one is a shame as it is a great method for promoting a web directory but I agree with Jeff that because Matt Cutts has gone on record as being against this method it would be wise not to do it.

3. No Linking To Bad Neighborhoods - Again I think this one is a given, if your allowing your bidding directories to link into bad neighborhoods be warned that this could affect your own rankings. Good examples of this would be to allow adult, pharmacy, gambling, etc.

4. More Quality Content - This is a problem that I estimate 90% of bidding directories struggle with. Not just because of empty categories but pure lack of anything written on a page.

5. Reciprocal Linking - This doesn’t apply to bidding directories as the issue was as a direct result of Matt Cutts failure to review a page on a web site properly and comprehend exactly what was being asked for.

6. No Cross Linking - I disagree with Jeff on this point and not because Matt Cutts didn’t come out and specifically state this. However Matt did make reference to the fact that Jeff was using Private Registration for his domains. Therefore there was no way that Google could have known whether Jeff was cross linking web sites which he owned as opposed to link buying. I am of the opinion that Google thought these were paid links.

7. Contact Details - I think the fact that Google takes this into consideration is a shame. Jeff’s reasons for not wishing to share his contact details were completely understandable. Now as it was Matt Cutts himself who pointed out this potential problem to Jeff via this comment and this comment I will use him as an example. But first lets be clear, Matt did not state Jeff should post this information on his web site, he was pointing out a combination of ‘hidden’ information which Google was taking into account.

Matt however does hide behind Googles corporate address for his domain name whois information and does not publish a phone number. In addition, his blog does not provide ANY way to contact him other than through the comment system, let alone offer an  address or telephone. I do to some degree think that this is double standards.

8. Too Many Directories - I agree with Jeff’s comment in that I do not agree with Google applying penalties based on the wider spectrum of web sites owned by the same person. While Jeff felt the need to shed some of his neglected projects, this is not something which I will be doing purely to please Google.

9. No Redirection of Expired Domains - This is something that I had been doing on a few of my projects. From a directory owners perspective the purpose is to drive as much traffic through the directory to the sites listed in order to provide a more optimal service for the customer. Therefore it did make sense to 301 redirect other domains to relevant categories or to the homepage of the site.

However what caught my eye was this comment posted by the owner of ask-dir.com. You will note that he mentioned how the two domains have differing PR values. This led me to investigate my 301 redirects before I removed them and sure enough the evidence was the same.

Basically what was happening was that the original web directory would be placed under a manual penalty and it’s PR would be frozen for want of a better word. However because Google doesn’t factor in the 301 domains during the manual penalty, when the PR update occurs, the 301 redirects get assigned the REAL PR that the penalized domain would have received if it wasn’t frozen.

Sadly Matt didn’t respond to any further questions so we never got an answer, however it does make me wonder if Matt noticed that this may indeed be a problem with the Google algorithm

Anyway, I will leave you to make up your own mind on that point.

I would like to thank Jeff once again for posting a great article which is sure to help out many web directory and bidding directory owners.

Just a quick heads up to let you know we have made a few small alterations to the Bidilicious Rank system to take into account some new criteria and improve performance.

This did result in a slight shift of the results with a few bidding directories increasing and a couple decreasing.

A bidding directory owner has also been in touch with us with a complaint about our ranking system which did highlight a small bug in the system. We are currently working on fixing the issue and will make an announcement when that has been completed.

In the meantime we would like to thank that person although they have requested to remain anonymous.

I am pleased to say that the new bidding directory resources section is almost complete.

So a final request before we put it live, if you have any bidding directory related resources be it templates, mods, guides or anything related to bidding directories please get in touch and let us know.

I was chatting with a friend the other day who runs a web site that lists sites in a similar way to Bidilicious but without the custom developed BR to rank the sites.

He mentioned that he was adding sites to his lists manually because after the initial opening of his site he noticed that only the serious web masters would submit whilst the less serious would be afraid of being shown in a less than perfect light.

This got me to thinking about whether I should do the same with Bidilicious because our system could also show up a web master who is claiming to be promoting his / her site but in reality is doing nothing.

I have therefore instructed our team to start going through the search engines and picking out bidding directories which have yet to be included in our list. These will be added with the following default description over the coming days and weeks:

“This bidding directory has been added by a member of the Bidilicious team. If you are the owner of this web site and would like to add a more appropriate description please use the Contact Us page. Please ensure you send a description that follows our guidelines displayed on the Add Directory page.”

As the description states, if you are the owner of one of the web sites which we have added please feel free to get in touch with us with a more detailed description of your site. We will gladly change it for you so long as it meets our guidelines.

If you have tried to submit your phpLB bidding directory to Google’s Webmaster Tools using the file upload verification method, you have no doubt seen that Google does not like the way phpLB handles 404 error pages.

If you visit practically any bidding directory which is running this software and enter a URL which does not exist, such as:

http://www.directoryname.com/not-here.html

You will be presented with a nicely formatted error page informing you that the page your looking for doesn’t exist. When you request the page the phpLB software responds with a HTTP Header status code of “200 OK”. This is known in the industry as a Soft 404.

This is bad because it causes problems for services such as Google’s Webmaster Tools and search engine spiders. The way Google’s tool works is that you need to upload a file to prove ownership of the web site, if your site returns a soft 404 Google cannot determine if you really uploaded the file. In addition the search spiders have problems and waste bandwidth by trying various made up paths on your domain to try and obtain a hard 404 error.

Fortunately it is easy to fix, simply open up the index.php file and depending on your version…

Version: 1.4

Lines 158 to 161 read:

{
$tpl->define('page', 'error404.tpl');
$tpl->parse('page');
}


Change this to:

{
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
$tpl->define('page', 'error404.tpl');
$tpl->parse('page');
}


Version: 1.0

Lines 201 to 204 read:

{
$tpl->define('page', 'error404.tpl');
$tpl->parse('page');
}


Change this to:

{
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
$tpl->define('page', 'error404.tpl');
$tpl->parse('page');
}


Upload the index.php file to your site and thats it, your all done. Your phpLB will continue to return a nicely formatted error page but will do so with the correct HTTP Header status code of 404.

Webmasters have yet to pick up on how beneficial bidding directories can be in their link building campaigns especially those webmasters who are working on a shoestring budget.

As of todays date we have a total of 39 directories in the Bidilicious list. Of these 1 charges is GBP, 1 charges in Euros and the remaining 37 charge in USD. If we were to submit a single web site to each of the bidding directories on the list it would give us the following costs:

£2.00 ($3.93)
€2.00 ($2.93)
$257.84

Using Oanda currency exchange this would give us a grand total of $264.70 to generate 39+ virtually instant backlinks to your web site. Also bearing in mind that 28 of the 39 bidding directories also allow between 3 and 10 deeplinks with your submission.

Now lets assume that you play things smart and follow Alive’s tip and add an extra ten cents to each bid to ensure you stay slightly ahead of all the others who come along and submit at the minimum bid price. This would add an extra $3.90 to the above total.

Divide that up into the 39 and your average cost is just $6.89 per submission. That is not bad considering that up until Google’s recent crack down on buying and selling links, most link touts out there would be charging you more than that on a monthly basis!

Make sure you get the most out of bidding directories and remember to vary your link text and descriptions to ensure each directory is showing unique content for your detail page.

One of the keys to building a successful bidding directory is to create unique content that will draw in your target audience from the search engines.

There are a few ways you can go about this…

1) The first step and most important step from my point of view if you are running a categorized bidding directory is to add unique descriptions to the page for each individual category. This will add relevance to your listings.

2) If you are running a niche bidding directory then there really is nothing better than adding on a blog and customizing the look and feel to match your directory design. A blog is a great tool for attracting people who are interested in your niche to your bidding directory.

3) There is a great phpLinkBid mod written by Zorg Links which allows you to add articles to your bidding directory. This can be useful to add content to the site on a regular basis and keep the search engines indexing your site.

4) Again this one is for the categorized bidding directories, adding news feeds to your categories can provide the search engines with frequently updated content which the search engine spiders will eat up.

Of course there are many other ways you can add unique content to your web site and the more unique your idea is the more it will benefit you in the long run.

Remember: Content = Search Engines = Traffic = Sales

I came across a post on the Links Juice blog last night that presented a top 10 list of tips for start up directories. The one which caught my eye was the .htaccess URL rewrite as I have seen many general directory owners fail to implement it I wanted to see if the same was true of bidding directories.

I did a quick scan through some of the bidding directories on the Bidilicious list and found that quite a few of them have also neglected to implement this safeguard against duplicate content penalties.

As you cannot control who is linking to your web site you cannot advise them to use the www. prefix (or not) when they place that link. The search engines will follow these links and potentially decide that your site has duplicate content.

You can avoid such a penalty with just a couple of minutes of your time. In addition it will also ensure that any link juice from people linking to your site incorrectly is still carried through to the correct version of your site.

If you want your site to use the www. prefix in all cases, copy the following code into a file, save it using the name .htaccess and upload it to the root of your web site. Ensure that you replace ‘yourdomain’ with your domain

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

If you want to do it the other way and force all requests to work without the prefix, just swap around the www. in the above code.

Thats all there is to it, very simple quick method for protecting your site and ensuring all link juice is directed to the correct domain.