I thought it might be interesting to look up which sites received the most hits from our site.  It appears that most hits came from our free directory listings or were on it for a long time. This category get’s the most traffic by far.

Directories Receiving the Most Hits Since January 2006

We have been busy  over the last couple of months.  Web-Directories.ws now has 18,000 directory listings.

We have been aggressively researching directories.  Mostly from Google.  We have concentrated on adding regional sites.  Most of the recent additions this time around came from Canada.  We just finished a research project for Canadian city directories.  Here is a link to the Canadian directory listings.

Over the last 6 months we have added thousands of new directories. Most of these have been regional and niche directories.  We have reached this new number despite our effort to concentrate on quality rather than quantity.  Thousands of directories have been deleted,  Many inappropriate, parked or otherwise dead directories are gone. We attacked the listings in various manual and automated manners to clean it up. We have stopped listing large networks of directories along with most .info directories.

As a result, the number of general directories has not increased.   The number of free directories has actually gone done.  Here is our free directory list that now has 2700 listings.

Below are our latest PageRank stats, compiled from the database behind list of 16,000 directories. The last 2 weeks have been spent updating and cleaning up the directories in the list. We used a combination of various automated methods along with good old fashioned manual checks. We have recently checked thousands of the directories manually and got rid of quite a few sites that we not appropriate for the list. We are proud to say that the list is in the best shape that it has ever been, especially the free and article categories.

 P.S.  A big thanks to David at PHPLD for providing a new version of his PR updater.

Directory PageRank Stats as of Apr 20, 2010

Directory PageRank have been very strong over that last 5 Google PR updates. Google has recently removed penalties to a bunch of directories.   The following table compares PageRank in our database, showing percentage changes between February and April of 2010.  Overall, the outlook for directories seems to be better than it has for years.

 Percentage Change Since Last Update

Factors that may have affected these numbers:

• Since many of the directories are added by the editor of this site, the directories included are not 100% random. The results of any given date can be skewed by the types of directories that were added in the previous period. Of late,  we have concentrated on adding niche and regional directories.
• We have stopped adding most .info general directories.  Also, we have recently stopped adding most of the  large networks of directories hosted on the same IP.   In the past, we purposely added these directories to identify them.  In the last year, the task has become insurmountable as someone is always adding another 50-70 .info directories.  These directories usually disappear within a year or two.  We do add the .info that are submitted to us manually.

As a result of the factors above, the above stats should be used to identify long-term trends in the directory industry.

We research and add the majority of our directory  listings ourselves.  If your site is new or we have missed it then we will gladly add it for free. Our only criteria is that the website is a directory that offers  some type of submission process. We do not list adult directories. Please note that lower quality directories may be given a nofollow attribute.

To have your directory considered for inclusion in our list of directories simply add a comment below using this format:

• URL*:

• Type*: (e.g. general, travel,  blogs, USA, French language)

• Cost*: Free, Paid or Reciprocal

A “free” directory should provide “dofollow” listings without requiring anything in return (like a reciprocal link)

Example

• URL*: abctraveldirectory.com
  

• Type*: Niche / Travel

• Cost*: Free

In order to identify automated submissions only comments in the above format will be reviewed.. We usually review submissions  every 5-10 days.

To submit, add your directory info as a comment  below.

Note:  A small percentage of users have reported a blank screen when they try to add a comment. We suspect that these people are getting caught in the blog’s Askimet spam software. If you receive a blank screen please use our contact form to email your info. This post replaces the previous submit post.

Remember:  Directories Only.  Do no add you site if it is not a web directory. 

Below are our latest PageRank stats, compiled from our database of over 16,000 web directories.  Sorry it has taken so long to produce new stats.  We have been having trouble updating PR since Google changed their APIs in September.  David of PHPLD was kind enough to provide me with a beta copy of an update tool that runs on my local machine, but unfortunately a percentage of sites receive a false PR of NA.  This time around, I ran the script on directories that were PR2 and lower.  I then updated the PR manually in high usage categories.  I then reviewed a good portion (but not all) of the NA directories.  Over the last month, PR in the database has been corrected in various ways. Nevertheless, the number of NA directories is a bit higher than it should. Having said that, here are the PR stats.

Directory PR Statistics as of Feb 11, 2010

Directory PageRank have been very strong over that last 4 Google PR updates. The following table compares PageRank in our database, showing percentage changes between July of 2009 and the present.

Factors that may have affected these numbers:

• Since many of the directories are added by the editor of this site, the directories included cannot be considered random. The results of any given date can be skewed by the types of directories that were added in the previous period.  Of late, we have stopped adding most .info general directories and concentrated on adding niche and regional directories.  The number general directories has grown slower than other types.
• Some directories in the database have a false PR of NA (see first paragraph)

As a result of the factors above, the statistics produced are more useful in showing general long-term trends.

As most of you probably know, Google updated their toolbar PageRank on December 31st.   Overall I would have to say that the news was very good for directories.   As usual some went up and some when down.   It looks like the majority of sites only fluctuated by one.  The big news is that a bunch of directories that were penalized 2 years ago recovered their rankings and their PR.  I will complete a full analysis and post the results in the next couple of days.

 We have been working pretty hard over the last 6 weeks and have added over 1500 new US directories.  The majority of them are State and local directories.  If your business is local in nature then links from directories in your state or city should really help your search engine ranking.  See our  list of USA Directories.

If you would like to have your USA directory considered for inclusion in our list then add a comment to this post in the following format:

• URL*:

• Type*: (e.g. general, travel, blogs)

• Region*:  (e.g. USA, California, Chicago)

• Cost*: Free, Paid or Recip. ( free directories provide “dofollow” links without requiring anything in return).

• Comment:   If there is something about that sets it apart then include a 10 word comment.

Yes, we have been quite busy  over the last couple of weeks, adding new directories to Web-Directories.ws.  This represents unprecedented growth.  We just reached 14,000 directories 10 days ago.  It usually takes us 6 months to add an extra 1000 directories.

We have been aggressively researching directories.  Mostly from Google.  We have concentrated on adding regional sites.  We have added well over a thousand United States and Canadian directories.  Most of these have been at the state, provincial and city level.

United States

Here is a link to the USA directory listings.  I still have some State to do so I will be adding more in the coming week.  There are now over 500 Canadian directories listed.

 Canada

Here is a link to the Canadian directory listings.

Yes, we have been working hard and we now have well over 14,000 directory listings in our database.  We have done some extensive research and added quite a few high quality regional and niche directories.   For example, have a look at the lists of Canadian and United States directories.  There are quite a few provincial,  state and city listings.  For niche sites, check out the science directory list.

Yes it took a while but PR has finally been updated on our directory list. I apologize for the delay.  For years, I ran a program that ran through the database and updated the PR.  As a result of some Google changes this program recently stopped working.  To make matters worse, the writer of the program was no longer supporting it.

I searched around for a while but did not find anything to update the PageRank.  Finally, I was able to test a program from David at PHPLD that ran on my own machine. This program worked, but it’s results were far from perfect.  The good news that it updated the high PR well.  The bad news is that I received almost a thousand inaccurate PRs of NA (-1).  I then spent 4 days going through all the NA PRs to verify them.  On the brighter side, it gave me a chance to look at many of the directories that don’t get reviewed very often. I removed many dead directories or sites that are no longer directories. Unfortunately, I did not look at all of them.  I skipped many directories that had less change of having PR, such as sites where the directory is a sub-folder (e.g. abc.com/directory).

In the coming weeks, I will be working through improving the data further. If you see a site with inaccurate PR please help me out by filling in a report. Thanks in advance.