LL owners, who's friendly to search engine style freesites?

[Bill]

Max, what frustration I might have with uptight linklist owners comes _completely_ from my ordinary freesites. Not at all from my sefreesites. So the two things are really completely seperate.

And cmon, you LL owners bitch about us lousy submitters on a constant basis, is the rule now that we submitters can't occasionally bitch about owners and their idiosyncrasies? I'm sure you LL owners can take a little gentle ribbing. ;-}

And I did (or tried to) make a distinction between yahoo-style sefreesites, like pussy-freepussy, and DMOZ style freesites, which are much cleaner and simpler.

Yahoo style freesites were never intended to be linked by anything like a conventional linklist. I presented it as an example, to show that not all sefreesites are the same.

I may have muddied the water more than cleared it by talking about yahoo style sefreesites at all. Sorry about that.

So, what I was really talking about was linking to the dmoz-style sefreesites.

There's a lot more interesting stuff in your excellent post. You bring up category linking, which I was also going to bring up. There's almost too much to reply to, so I will pick one thing.

You said:
"What you're calling a "free site" in this application is really a hubbed out warning page with a standard freesite back end. My big concern on this type of site is what it may turn into as more and more links are added."

Yes, an accurate description, and that is something that does happen with sites like these- they do grow links over time. I can see that might be something that could get out of control. (In theory, they also increase in relevancy and ranking, which they pass back to the LL, much more so than a run of the mill freesite.)

However, there are excellent long established lists that don't seem to find this a big problem, as long as it's kept well under the enter link. It hasn't destroyed their lists or their reputation.