Thursday, February 10, 2011

Are Web Directories Set and Forget?

As the owner of Craigs Directory I try to keep a good hand on the websites listed in my directory, but I have noticed a disturbing trend...

As you may know, Craigs Directory is slightly different to normal web directories in that it ranks websites according to the number of credits each website has earned. These credits are earned through clicks or purchases.

When a website is submitted to my web directory, I send the user an email thanking them for their submission. Once their website is approved, I send them another email informing them. So far so good. After that, I send the user update emails 30 days, 60 days, 180 days and 1 year after submission to keep them informed about the rank of their website (there is an opt-out link).

Obviously, there are a few emails which bounce back telling me the account does not exist, but the longer the period from submission to email, the worse this situation becomes. When is comes to the 1 year emails, I am finding that about 1/3 of the emails are bouncing back!

I have a few questions:

  1. Do people change their email addresses annually?
  2. Do people use temporary emails when submitting to web directories?
  3. If the email address is no longer valid, is the website?

I have a webbot which checks all websites in my web directory and removes those that no longer exist. But what do I do about those that still exist but I can't contact the website owner? Delete it from my index?

Regards,
Craig

1 comment:

  1. Same issue, In my opinion those who can longer be contacted should be suspended and there link temporarily removed, if the author actually notices the link removal then I'm sure they'll be logging in to see why.

    I've had similar issues in the past and all my sites have the ability for the user too change their own email address (after verification too the new email) so in situations such as yours you can always state they neglected to update their own information.

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