Craigs Directory - Lessons Learned

Craigs Directory has been live for about 18 months now. It started as a simple web directory that ranked websites by credits. I admit I am a "techie" person and originally built it as a challenge and maybe because I was a little bored. However, its success has taught me quite a bit over the last 18 months, some good lessons and some bad.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not a one-time deal, it is ongoing. You need to keep at it, keep tweaking and keep promoting.

Google PageRank

This is probably only important to me because most people who submit their websites to Craigs Directory are keen to increase their own Google Ranking. However, I believe PageRank is always a few months out-of-date (in the Google toolbar) and Google wants us to focus more on ROI and not on visible pagerank.

That being said, Google penalized me in October 2010 for not adhereing to their strict guidelines - by removing my visible pagerank. My search results have not changed, so I know that Google has not removed me from their indexes, but I have noticed a 25% drop in daily submissions (±200 down to ±150 per day).

I have now corrected the reason for my penalty and hope to have my visible pagerank restored, but I am not too concerned as it has not effected me too much. BTW, Google still crawls about 2,500 pages of Craigs Directory per day.

Email

Email is still a good communication tool. Through Craigs Directory I send out numerouos emails, the purpose being to keep people up to date on the rank of their website. Unfortunately, there have been times where I have had to send out emails to let people know that their website has been declined for not adhering to my submission guidelines (basically no sex, drugs or hacking content). Suffice to say, there are some people out there who take things far too personally, enough said.

Whether it be through rejection or just plain malice, there have been attempts to damage Craigs Directory or is reputation. Over the last 18 months I have had to deal with really offensive emails, hacking attempts and even having my email being black-listed by Yahoo (that battle is still ongoing).

I have learnt a lot over the last 18 months, but mostly I have learned about people. SEO is all about ranking in the search engines, but we tend to forget that it is "people" that type in the search query.

Regards,
Craig