Please note: The information provided in the 58+ pages on this website was written in 2008 and contains old and out-dated information. I will be releasing new updated information soon that will show you how to get around the problems facing most of the web directories online today. So please sign up to the newsletter to get the soon-to-be released update!If you don’t want to go the Dmoz extraction route there are other ways to get content. The easiest way to get content for your directories fast is by purchasing databases and having that info imported into your directory. You can find databases on a large variety of topics and industries. The best place I’ve found to purchase content databases is from a company called Oddity Software. You can get databases as cheap as $50 that contain thousands of listings to hundreds of dollars for millions of listings.
Importing millions of listings into any script will cause it to severely slow down so I’d take some precaution in importing that many. The most listings I’ve imported into a database at once was 68,000 and it ran fine. It was imported into a site using PHP Link Directory. You could definitely get away with more but again I’d start off with smaller amounts. Maybe import half and start there. It’s good to test and it helps to have fast hosting if you plan to run a gigantic directory.
The Good
The good thing about buying databases is that you don’t have to spend the time to build up that many categories and listings. It helps your site to have plenty of content for spidering. It’s good to have lots of content. That’s why I use DMOZ for extracting data when I want to seed my Indexu directories.
The directory that I made $8,000 from was a blog directory. I bought a database of 68,000 blogs and had it imported into a PHP Link Directory script. I built up some links to the site so that it had decent Pagerank and some of the blog owners who I had linked to saw that I had linked to their site and quickly added my directory button graphic to their blog. This built up the Pagerank to my directory and from this it quickly rose up in the SERPS of Google. The blog directory is now in the top ten blog directories online. As of this writing it is actually the #3 listing on Google for the search term “blog directory”. It receives over a 1,000+ visitors a day now. (Please note search engine listings always change and the site might no longer have the same rankings when you’re reading this.)
The Bad
The good outweighs the bad, but one thing to be aware of when buying content is whether it will be seen by Google as duplicate content or not. Many people have different opinions about what duplicate content is but from my many years of working online I can tell you that it’s not that big of a deal. If you use a different layout or add different text to areas of your site that surround your content you shouldn’t have a problem. The only thing Google or other search engines are looking for is exact duplicates of entire pages.
Another thing to worry about when using a database of info for directories is that the original owners might find your site and want to update their info (or worse delete it). This can be tricky because you never know if people are who they say they are. You should be safe though if you ask them to email you the updated info. If their listing actually has a website then ask them to send you an email from their sites domain.
Another thing to be aware of is that databases purchased from Oddity Software are more like Yellow page listings in that they don’t usually have a site description. Most business listings just contain a name, address, phone # etc. and a lot of the time they don’t even include a website address.
You can view samples of the databases on Oddity Software’s site so check them out to get an idea of the listings you will be dealing with. All directory scripts can be customized with unique fields and the data can then be imported.
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