A web directory or link directory is a directory Generally, a directory, as used in computing and telephony, refers to a repository or database of information which is heavily optimized for reading, under the assumption that data updates are very rare compared to data reads. Commonly, a directory supports search and browsing in addition to simple lookups on the World Wide Web The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known as the Web, is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them by using hyperlinks. Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, British. It specializes in linking In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to a document that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically[citation needed]. The reference points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks. Such text is usually viewed with a computer. A software system for viewing and to other web sites A website [citation needed] is a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are addressed relative to a common Uniform Resource Locator (URL), often consisting of only the domain name, or the IP address, and the root path ('/') in an Internet Protocol-based network. A web site is hosted on at least one web server, and categorizing Categorization is the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Categorization implies that objects are grouped into categories, usually for some specific purpose. Ideally, a category illuminates a relationship between the subjects and objects of knowledge. Categorization is fundamental in language, those links.[1]
A web directory is not a search engine A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are usually presented in a list of results and are commonly called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike and does not display lists of web pages based on keywords An index term, subject term, subject heading, or descriptor, in information retrieval, is a term that captures the essence of the topic of a document. Index terms make up a controlled vocabulary for use in bibliographic records. They are an integral part of bibliographic control, which is the function by which libraries collect, organize and; instead, it lists web sites by category and subcategory. Most web directory entries are also not found by web crawlers A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, or Web spiders, Web robots, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutters but by humans.[1] The categorization is usually based on the whole web site rather than one page or a set of keywords, and sites are often limited to inclusion in only a few categories. Web directories often allow site owners to directly submit their site for inclusion, and have editors review submissions for fitness.
RSS directories are similar to web directories, but contain collections of RSS feeds RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship, instead of links to web sites.
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Scope of listing
Most of the directories are very general in scope and list websites across a wide range of categories, regions and languages. But there are also some niche directories which focus on restricted regions, single languages, or specialist sectors. One type of niche directory with a large number of sites in existence, is the shopping directory A shopping directory is a "Yellow Pages Directory Style" website similar to the Open Directory Project or the Yahoo! Directory with focus on sites that sell products or services, usually referred to as ecommerce websites for example. Shopping directories specialize in the listing of retail e-commerce Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, or e-business consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. The use of commerce is conducted in sites.
Examples of well known, general, web directories are Yahoo! Directory The Yahoo! Directory is a web directory which rivals the Open Directory Project in size. The directory was Yahoo!'s first offering. When Yahoo! changed to crawler-based listings for its main results in October 2002, the human-edited directory's significance dropped, but it is still being updated. The Yahoo! Directory offers two options for and the Open Directory Project The Open Directory Project , also known as Dmoz (from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links. It is owned by Netscape, but it is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors (ODP). ODP is significant due to its extensive categorization and large number of listings and its free availability Open content, a neologism coined by analogy with open source, describes any kind of creative work, or content, published under a license that explicitly allows copying and modifying of its information by anyone, not exclusively by a closed organization, firm or individual. Open content is an alternative paradigm to the use of copyright to create for use by other directories and search engines.[2]
However, a debate over the quality of directories and databases still continues, as search engines use ODP's content without real integration, and some experiment using clustering Cluster analysis or clustering is the assignment of a set of observations into subsets so that observations in the same cluster are similar in some sense. Clustering is a method of unsupervised learning, and a common technique for statistical data analysis used in many fields, including machine learning, data mining, pattern recognition, image. There have been many attempts to make directory development easier, such as using automated submission of related links by script, or any number of available PHP PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document. As a general-purpose portals and programs. Recently, social software Social software encompasses a range of software systems that allow users to interact and share data. This computer-mediated communication has become very popular with social sites like MySpace and Facebook, media sites like Flickr and YouTube as well as commercial sites like Amazon.com and eBay. Many of these applications share characteristics techniques have spawned new efforts of categorization, with Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. is an American-based multinational electronic commerce company. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, it is America's largest online retailer, with nearly three times the Internet sales revenue of the runner up, Staples, Inc., as of January 2010 adding tagging In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system to their product pages.
Directories have various features in listing, often depend upon the price paid for inclusion:
- Free submission – there is no charge for the review and listing of the site
- Reciprocal link – a link back to the directory must be added somewhere on the submitted site in order to get listed in the directory
- Paid submission – a one-time or recurring fee is charged for reviewing/listing the submitted link
- No follow nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring – there is a
rel="nofollow"attribute associated with the link, meaning search engines will give no weight to the link. - Featured listing – the link is given a premium position in a category (or multiple categories) or other sections of the directory, such as the homepage. Sometimes called sponsored listing.
- Bid for position – where sites are ordered based on bids
- Affiliate links Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. Examples include rewards sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site. The industry has four – where the directory earns commission for referred customers from the listed websites
Human-edited directories
A human-edited directory is created and maintained by editors who add links based on the policies particular to that directory.
Human-edited directories are often targeted by SEOs Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more on the basis that links from reputable sources will improve rankings in the major search engines A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are usually presented in a list of results and are commonly called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike. Some directories may prevent search engines from rating a displayed link by using redirects, nofollow nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring attributes, or other techniques. Many human-edited directories, including the Open Directory Project The Open Directory Project , also known as Dmoz (from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links. It is owned by Netscape, but it is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors and World Wide Web Virtual Library The World Wide Web Virtual Library was the first index of content on the World Wide Web and still operates as a directory of e-texts and information sources on the web. It was started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of HTML and the Web itself, in 1991 at CERN in Geneva. Unlike commercial index sites, it is run by a loose confederation of, are edited by volunteers, who are often experts in particular categories. These directories are sometimes criticized due to long delays in approving submissions, or for rigid organizational structures and disputes among volunteer editors.
In response to these criticisms, some volunteer-edited directories have adopted wiki Wikis may exist to serve a specific purpose, and in such cases, users use their editorial rights to remove material that is considered "off topic." Such is the case of the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia. In contrast, open purpose wikis accept content without firm rules as to how the content should be organized technology, to allow broader community participation in editing the directory (at the risk of introducing lower-quality, less objective entries).
Another direction taken by some web directories is the paid for inclusion model. This method enables the directory to offer timely inclusion for submissions and generally fewer listings as a result of the paid model. They often offer additional listing options to further enhance listings, including features listings and additional links to inner pages of the listed web site. These options typically have an additional fee associated, but offer significant help and visibility to sites and/or their inside pages.
Today submission of websites to web directories is considered as a common SEO (search engine optimization) technique to get vital back-links for the submitted web site. One distinctive feature of 'directory submission' is that it cannot be fully automated like search engine submissions. Manual directory submission is a tedious and time consuming job and is often outsourced by the webmasters.
Bid for Position directories
Bid for Position directories or also known as bidding web directories, are paid-for-inclusion web directories where the listings of websites in the directory are ordered according to their bid amount. They are special in that the more a person pays, the higher up the list of websites in the directory they go. With the higher listing, the website becomes more visible and increases the chances that visitors who browse the directory will click on the listing.[3]
See also
- Article directory Article directories are websites where users submit unique articles to be categorized and included to a specific niche.Well-written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of increasing the authoring business' credibility within its market as well as attracting new clients
- List of web directories A web directory is a listing of websites organized in a hierarchy or interconnected list of categories
- SOBI2 Sigsiu Online Business Index 2 is an open source web directory component and content construction kit (CCK) for the Joomla! content management system (CMS). SOBI2 is written in PHP and requires the MySQL database environment for storage. It is best suited for low to medium level traffic web-sites
- Webring A webring is a collection of websites linked together in a circular structure. When used to improve search engine rankings, webrings can be considered a search engine optimization technique
References
- ^ a b Wendy Boswell. "What is a Web Directory". About.com. http://websearch.about.com/od/enginesanddirectories/a/subdirectory.htm. Retrieved 2010-02-25.
- ^ Paul Festa (December 27, 1999), Web search results still have human touch, CNET News.com, retrieved September 18, 2007
- ^ How Bidding Directories Work
Categories: Search engine optimization Categories: Internet search engines | Internet marketing by method | Web directories A web directory is a directory on the World Wide Web that specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links. This category includes online web directories
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