Open Your Arm for New Site

A couple of days ago, I wrote an article - New Site Deserve More Attention From Webmasters, whose basic idea is to ask webmasters not do overlook the potential value of those new directories and content websites. Today, I'd like to reverse the topic to some extent - Directories should learn to open their arms to accept new sites.

It's not uncommon that directories claim that they don't accept new sites with PR 0. Enforcing this constraint, they hope to maximize the overall quality and credibility of their directory. Personally I wouldn't agree with this claim. On the contrary, I strongly believe that accepting new sites with high quality into their directories does benefit them greatly.

First of all, I don't see any correlation between member sites' PR and directory's own success. The purpose of directory is acting as a parking farm for different categories of website. Unlike content websites for which content quality and uniqueness are top concern, the critical success factors for directories are, but not limited to, the number of websites they contain and diversity of the websites. Rejecting new sites whose PR is still zero, the directory might end up containing only those mature sites which have been already included in numerous other directories. Besides, directories usually offer free one-way text link to other websites, which means giving a free vote to others with regard to PR. So, no matter what the PR of other websites is, the directory's ranking and popularity won't be impacted. The benefit of new site for directories is more obvious when directories ask for reciprocal links from their member websites, since those new websites are much more willing to link to the directories.

Besides, any new site will become old quite soon. Google search engine ranking update, major or minor, is more and more frequent nowadays. It's quite easy for a website to get a bigger than zero PR after doing the basic promotion homework, such as automatic submission to mainstream search engines, posting in forums, social bookmarking and so on. Although the waiting period from old to new is quite short, directories cannot afford to wait until those new sites become old before accepting them. The risks are, the webmasters of those original new websites may no longer be interested in directory submission, given the decreasing importance of directory submission for website promotion. Besides, based on my experience, the enthusiasm of webmasters are much higher at the early days of promotion and it will decrease quite quickly thereafter. If directories fail to seize the opportunity of accepting those new websites at the very beginning, it's highly likely that the opportunity will be gone forever.

According to what was said above, I strongly believe that it's to directories' own interest to accept new websites, especially those with high quality and great potential. Dmoz.org is the best ever example of directory practice. As you know, it pose rigid standard with regard to submitted websites. However, if you look at its submission form, its quite straightforward. No matter the website you submit is new or old, it won't take you much time to get your website across. I suggest other directories learn from Dmoz.org. The best practice is to redesign their submission form to make it open to any website, and leave the screening process to human's hand. That way, it will get exposed to a greater websites pools and at the same time maintain a high level of quality.