8 replies to this topic

[petersn]

We received an email solicitation to submit (for a "reduced for limited time fee" to Best of the Web at www.botw.org. They seemed to have picked up on the fact that we just got into the Yahoo directory. I haven't seen this directory show up on any "recommended directories" list. What's the opinion of this group? or ?

-Nancy

[qwerty]

Well, it appears it's $29.95 just to be reviewed, and another $29.95 to be listed each year if your site is accepted. For a directory I've never heard of, which apparently contacts site owners rather than the other way around, that seems a bit steep to me.

I looked in the category one of my sites would fit, and it was empty.

[petersn]

I forgot to mention www.botw.org has a Pagerank of 7. Might that make a difference?

There are no sites in my category either (business\shopping and services\food and drink\seafood). In fact when I look around there are virtually no sites listed anywhere...

So who are these guys and how did they get a pagerank of 7?

-Nancy

[Scottie]

They have a PR7 based mostly on internal links and cross-links from www.searchenginecolossus.com that add up to, 4,210 inbound links.

When drilling down, it seems most of the (empty) category pages have a PR1.

If you need a link and are willing to pay them for inclusion, I don't see a problem with it although I usually discount the credibility of anyone who uses e-mail spam for marketing.

[Jill]

What Scottie said. (Again!)

Jill

[mcanerin]

Frankly, I'd also be very careful of giving them your email address as part of the signup, and I assume you would have to.

After all, presumably you did not receive this email because you opted-in, so it would be difficult to believe a claim that they respect your email privacy. I admit I'm very conservative this way, but I have enough problems with spam to worry about actually signing up for it - and worse, paying for it!

I don't know if this particular company is a spammer, but so far I haven't seen anything that makes me want to trust them yet. Once again, I've very conservative so it may be fine for others.

Ian

[Matt B]

I'll jump on the bandwagon of what Scottie said and Jill seconded. I would be wary of any company that contact you by unsolicited email. Especially when it isn't even personalized, or they obviously have not visited your site.

Use your gut feeling and common sense. Those can usually be your best indicator of a course of action.

To use an analogy from your business: If the fish smells fishy, then you shouldn't buy it.

BTW, Nancy - are you offering a discount to the HR Forum anytime soon?
(I'm a Midwest transplant from the East Coast and man, do I miss fresh seafood))

[Scottie]

A little more research shows they used to give out web awards (ooooh- remember those? Flashing banners you "got" to put on your site for, basically, submitting it?). A lot of their internal links are to past award pages (some from 1996, I saw...).

Their other external links that aren't Search Engine Colossus are, interestingly, a lot of educator's personal pages. I haven't figured out why. They are mostly "my favorite links" type pages and most are from universities.

None of this makes them bad or good... just interesting that they seemed to have changed their business model recently.

[Bill Slawski]

It seems like it has been a long time, (and it probably has been), but once upon a time Best of the Web was actually an incredible site to get a link from.

They would give out yearly awards. Here's a page from the internet archive showing the winners from 1997:

http://web.archive.o...997/awards.html

1998 seems to be the last year that they gave out awards. The awards were originally given out by a student on a university site, but they were very well known.

The address listed in the whois information appears to be a mail drop for quite a few online businesses.

The web site for the design company that sponsored the last few years of the Best of the Web awards -- afterfive technologies -- has shut down too, and their domain name is for sale.

I'd venture (IMHO, this is a best guess) that this is a different operation, and that they circumvented "expired domain" problems by selling the business (tradename transfer, maybe) which owned the site rather than by transfering ownership of the domain name.

Those educators really need to update their links