Linklists and Free Sites: How Do We Move Forward?

[mb]

Originally Posted by tigermom

Awesome post. Very well written, on top of containing great advice.

My only question to LL owners would be, if you can so easily tell the automated junk from the hand-made sites, why not reject the junk and help us all keep the system healthier?

If it were only that easy! Not every link list has the luxury of having "too many submissions". We do because we've been around for so long, as do a handful of other linklists. But smaller linklists are in love with submissions. The more the better. So in the quest for more submissions, quality assurance goes out the door. What they don't realize is that by only taking quality, hand built submissions and deleting the rest, they are helping their linklist exponentially. The bad ones dilute their traffic and affect their SE rankings in a way that they might not notice on the surface. But this cyclical negative effect is real.

Let's say you only accept 1 out of every 5 submissions you receive. But that one site is high quality and will eventually rank well in the SEs. The linklist that ONLY has that one site listed will fare much better than the one that accepted the other 4 autogenerated junk sites that are in turn on the negative side of the SEs and returning the favor to their linklist. Additionally, their surfers will enjoy that 1 site, end up at a quality sponsor, maybe join and come back the next day for another high quality submission. The linklist with the 4 junk listings will send their surfers to hell and lose that surfer forever.

You've got to think long term and be patient with this stuff. Again, nothing comes easy. We've drastically cut down on the number of submissions we accept at hoes.com for the very reasons I've outlined above and will continue to be more strict in the future.

marc

[Maj. Stress]

Originally Posted by mb

Let's say you only accept 1 out of every 5 submissions you receive. But that one site is high quality and will eventually rank well in the SEs. The linklist that ONLY has that one site listed will fare much better than the one that accepted the other 4 autogenerated junk sites that are in turn on the negative side of the SEs and returning the favor to their linklist. Additionally, their surfers will enjoy that 1 site, end up at a quality sponsor, maybe join and come back the next day for another high quality submission. The linklist with the 4 junk listings will send their surfers to hell and lose that surfer forever.

I made mistake of accepting just about anything reasonable submitted since my list was growing very slow. Lost almost all of my search engine traffic (which was a fairly decent amount). It has been a long hard ride trying to get it back too.

I will not be making that same mistake with my directory. If it takes 10 years to get it rocking, so be it.