Business.com which is considered as one of the most respected premium web directories hikes up it’s prices for general listings effective from May 1st 2008.

Business.com currently charges $199.00/year for standard listing which will now be $299.00 from May 1st 2008. Now that is really lot of money, If link owners decide to renew their listings. 

Many webmasters feel that it is just another marketing move to hike up the prices and then come up with discount coupons for directory inclusions.

Personally I feel that if you have a B2B E-commerce site then getting listed with Business.com is really worth the money. Please post your comments on the price hike by business.com

Popularity: 24% [?]

Now you can place videos on the category pages based on keywords from youtube.com on you PhpLD powered directories easily with Youtube Videos category mod launched by David (Admin).

The Videos are pulled based on the categories (keywords) and displayed just above the category structure. 5 video thumbnails are displayed above the category page. Each video is displayed on it’s own detail page.

Live Demo : http://www.sherlockdirectory.com/yt_mod/index.php?c=3

This mod also comes with a professional installation of $15.00

Installation : http://www.phplinkdirectory.com/forum/showthread.php?t=21406

You can always edit the way the videos are displayed on your directory by making changes to the template files.

Popularity: 44% [?]

The deeplinks mod allows you to add other pages of your site to be submitted along with the homepage so that more pages of your sites gets indexed. PhpLD (php link directory) does not support the deeplink feature as default on the submit page and the submission of the deeplinks can be achieved by either a paid mod ($100.00 comes with full installation and support by Rob) or free deeplinks mod for phpLD v3.3 by mhamdi.

Now I really appreciate the amount of effort that mhamdi has put in releasing the mod for free and updating it for the current version of PhpLD.

For more click here.

Popularity: 44% [?]

Lola Directory is not similar to the general web directories but a refined version of bidding directory where you bid for your anchor text keywords that are placed on the homepage. The directory has an impressive PR6 with an Alexa ranking of 360,488 with a very simple and cool design.

On the homepage, you see a keyword cloud that has that actually forms the category for this directory. On general web directories your link will be placed as homepage – category1 – category2 – then your link. Now on Lola Keyword directory you you have to decide how many keywords you want to submit your site to. Lets take for this example the maximum five.

So suppose you want to submit your website Directory Blog (www.directorytotal.com) with keywords like Directory Blog, Web directory Blog, PhpLD templates and so on. You head to the submit page where you can enter up to 5 keywords for your site. The Keyword prices are automatically calculated as per the popularity of the keyword in the database & also the more keywords you submit you get a discount appropriately. A keyword like “Web Directory” will cost you around $25.00 to be submitted and also If you enter up to 5 keywords then you get 20% discount.

You can have a look at the top 10 keywords on Lola directory so you have a better idea while submission of your keywords. More info on can be found on the FAQ page from the directory. I personally feel that it is well worth the investment to be place your link on PR6 page and in the process get a strong backlink your site.

Popularity: 36% [?]

Hi Guys, I recently stumbled upon this site called SEOmeter – shows you graphically how Google crawls your site, all the info is made available to you in terms of graphics useful for seo analysis and understanding the behavior of the Google Bot. SeoMeter has come up with a new term “crawl cycle (CC)” which is the time between two consecutive crawls by search engine robots.

A short Crawl rate (CC) means that the website is crawled multiple times by Google and chances are there the content is rapidly updating on these forums (e.g Digg.com which really has massive user generated content) and definitely enjoys Google’s trust and also higher search engine rankings. A larger CC will be more for a static websites where the content is not updated on a regular basis.

Let’s us put SeoMeter – Google Crawl tool to the real test with sites like CNN.com and then we will compare the Crawl rate with other sites.

With the graph that shows the crawl frequency you get complete analysis as shown in the figure below.

Now you also have the option of comparing sites or blogs in terms of how well they perform in terms of the crawl rate. You can also generate button that can be displayed on your blog that shows how Google crawls your site as shown in the image to the right.

I was just about to compare and check how all the web directories performed on the Google Crawl meter until I found Top-20 Most Crawled Sites in Web Directories Category that lists all the major directories with crawl rate. Not to be surprised Yahoo directory and Info Vilesilencer list are the obvious topped the list with a crawl rate of 0.7 (wow)

I really suggest that this is an awesome tool for directory owners to check how well their site is performing and how well it is being crawled and is performing with so much data made available in form of graphs. Start to monitor your site’s crawling activities you will have to submit your site to Seometer & also the submission is free for the top level domain and the sub-domain. There is a annual fee of $20.00 for internal url submission (which is really nominal).

Thumbs Up :

1. SeoMeter has a nice Web 2.0 design and does not deviate from the core tool offered.

2. Blog with updated information on the tool.

3. Good use of graphs on all the pages & all the information is easily made available.

4. Nice idea listing Top-20 Most Crawled Sites on the Web

Suggestions : I think it nice tool & it’s abilities should not be limited only to the Google bot (monitoring only Google crawl), But other bot’s should like Yahoo and MSN should also be included.

Popularity: 66% [?]