| Detailed Review: Ask Directory |
Detailed Review: Ask Directory Date Reviewed: 16-03-2007
Name: Ask Directory
URL: http://ask-dir.com
Type: General
PageRank: 4/10 (Main Page)
Looks & Design: Ok, it sure has something in the looks department. For every category, they have an icon presenting that category. And those icons look consistent. Most importantly they don't clash. Probably took a lot of effort on their part to get those pictures. And I like the colour used. I would say good job on their part. But I believe that this is modified from another template.
On their footer, they have some more icons which are actually internal advertisements (to detail pages) for featured links. And for featured listings, you do get exposure in the form of textlinks in other categories as well. This is a good thing if you are loooking to get a featured listing on this directory. But it does look distracting to users. Other than icons, there have a few textlinks on the mainpage as well. However, these are not sitewide links but they do appear at the submit page (as affiliate links). There are no external banner advertisements on this directory.
Functionality: Try clicking on one of the categories. For example, click on the Software Subcatgeory. Instead of being directed to a page without much content or contains just links, you will see that the category page has information on the topic at hand. And it is not a one line grunt, it's a full in-depth article. But before we go further, I need to mention that some of those articles seem to be taken from a foreign language Wiki, shafted into a language translator and then copied here. I have a little example below from a screenshot (I don't want to get arrested by the Copyscape Gestapo by copying the text!):
Readable, but it sounds like a five year old kid had written the article. Well, having unique text is good for Search Engines, but this kind of writing is certainly bad for the directory's image. And you thought my English is bad.
To submit your site to this directory, you need to browse at least to a main category. From there you can click on "Submit Site" at the top right menu to add your listing. The weird thing is that from there you can choose any category you want to submit to. I don't see the need to browse to a category, just to submit a site. It would be much more convenient to allow their customers to submit from their frontpage. However, they provide a variety of options for their customers to choose from. Featured listings will always be on top of the regular listings. And the listings are arranged according to the date of submission. Ask also provides a screenshot for every listing. However, I think it would be better to have a real-time screenshot as these may get outdated fairly soon.
Ask Directory has a good number of categories for it's customers to choose from. And the directory level is not too deep. The deepest I saw was 3 levels in. However since Ask is a rather new directory, their listings are limited. The maximum number of listings I saw was in the Directory category, with only 17 listings in different subcategories. I am sure this would be appealing for anyone looking for some PageRank juice coming their way. It is good to note that all the categories shown have at least one listing, so you won't find any empty categories on this directory. This means that if a category has no listing, it won't be displayed on the directory. But you will still be able to submit your site to that category. Once approved, the category will appear. So just because the category doesn't appear on the directory, doesn't mean that they don't have it. Very innovative idea to prevent Search Engines from indexing empty categories I must say!
The biggest selling point of this directory is it's custom description for it's listings, just like GoGuides. The description the customer provides will only be used as a guide. Ask Directory will write their own description for your site. Octopedia allows a single main page URL link (with anchor text) in their description. Ask Directory goes one step further, they offer a 500 word article and up to 10 deeplinks (with different anchor text) in those articles. This means that these deeplinks are embedded into the article itself. The 500 word article only appears in the detail page though. And if you have a featured listings, those detail page will get a lot of exposure because they appear throughout the directory. Furthermore unlike the articles written for the categories, these articles are definitely better sounding however I did find some spelling mistakes on them. I think they should have at least spellcheck their articles first especially since someone paid at least US$60 for it.
I was browsing through some of their listings and I realized that one listing had somehow slipped through Ask's custom description re-write. You can see the listing's detail page here. It has a 4 word description! But the rest of the listings' descriptions seem quite ok, although most are still one liners. I am not sure what is the limit for the number of characters Ask Directory has for it's regular site descriptions, but it looks like it is around 400 or so. With all that said, those 500 word articles on the detail pages can really help increase the site's visibility and exposure. And we all know that Search Engines love text content.
Oh, some of their listing do not have their PR properly shown. It just shows N/A or it is outdated. And on some of the categories (for example, Internet->Other resources and Computer->Software->Downloads ), the listings have no outgoing links on their description. Not sure whether this is intentional or not. But I guess very likely these are staff added sites.
Anyway the real problem of this directory is it's lack of listings. I doubt traffic will be good for this directory and I can browse through this directory in just under 2 hours. Hope that it will continue to grow and make up this shortfall.
Price: Permanent, one time payment. Regular - US$30, Featured - US$50/Year, Regular with custom article and 5 additional links - US$60, Regular with custom article and 10 additional links - US$80, Featured with custom article and 5 additional links - US$80, Featured with custom article and 10 additional links - US$100
What? Not US$29.99 ??
Search Engine Friendliness: As a fairly new directory, Ask Directory has a mainpage PR value of 4. But their sitemap page has a PR value of 5! And for this sitemap page, all the links point to their categories and subcategories which is a good thing. It makes sure that the PR flow is consistent throughout the different category pages. Most of the main categories and subcategories have a PR value of 3 to 4. Inner categories have PR from 0 to 4. However to be fair to Ask Directory, some of the categories could be new additions (they don't show the date of submission), so the publicly shown PR may not yet updated.
Futhermore, their directory is not crowded at the moment, it should be able to have a lot of categories pretty much to yourself. And if you are the sort that adores PR, you will realize that this directory has nofollow attributes on it's own sitewide internal links like "New Sites", "Top Sites", "About Us" and "Contact Us". So this means more PR flow for more important pages, like your very own listings. But I think they shouldn't block access to their "About Us" page. That page has some good keyworded content for them to rank. There are no external sitewide links in this directory so there is no additional PR leak. And looking at their backlinks, they could be getting a higher PR at the next public update. This will cetainly make their customers more comfortable with getting a listing here.
At the time of writing, Ask has about 1,400 pages indexed by Google and about 12,000 backlinks (this figure is not accurate). So as I mentioned before, this is a new directory and their listings are limited. Due to the fact now that Google has blocked direct search for supplemental pages, I have to manually search for them, but I couldn't find any. And I am not surprised. Category pages each comes with a very unique (and wordy) article, so the chance of them going supplemental is slim. And for each category, they have unique meta descriptions as well, even for the subcategories (they use the category keywords). A big thumbs up. As for the number of backlinks, it is still respectable. With both backlinks and unique content, I am very sure that Search Engine spiders would be attracted to Ask Directory. You would almost certainly get a number of spiders coming your way if you get listed here as well. Moreover for the "popular categories", they are linked to from almost every page. That will ensure that these "popular categories" will be spider more often than not. And if you paid for the featured listing, you could have your detail page links displayed in other categories as well, adding to the chance of your site getting spidered.
Well, I often complained about directories and their site descriptions being sparse. Although some of the listings in this directory are, this is probably one of the few directories with real and unique descriptions. And having text rich (and keyword rich) detail pages will certainly help. A directory with duplicate content will almost certainly not be as valued to Search Engines as those with unique content. And so will the weightage of their links. If you have the correct anchor text, you could possibly see your rankings improve in Search Engines. Furthermore, if you have the custom article and 5 additonal deeplinks, all the better. However, with all that said, they do lack listings. I don't think they have more than 500 listings in their directory. I could be wrong, but seriously that number of listings just isn't enough to attract real human visitors.
Well, looks like this directory's features are catered especially for Search Engine Optimization and improving their client's rankings.
Value: I like this directory. It shows great potential. However for it's regular and featured options, they are just too expensive. And without the size nor the popularity, this directory charges a premium in a market where the competition is cut-throat. Yes, you get great backlinks and some PR, but for the price, you could be listed in other directories with higher PR and with more traffic. And these directories are big name ones. With that said, I would recommend you to get the option with the unique article. For US$60 and 6 backlinks (and anchor text) along with "keyworded" content, it's certainly a good deal. It's like asking someone to write an optimized article for you plus you get lots of backlinks. I will also recommend you to get listed in the "popular categories". These categories are where spiders will gather. Don't worry about the PR.
If you are looking for direct traffic, don't bother. Nobody will search if there isn't anything to search for.
Overall: A very good, innovative and forward thinking directory especially designed for the webmaster looking to improve his/her rankings. It has a lot of unique features. It's just too bad it's listings are too few.
Comments: I like directories which think big. But as always, I believe that they should start small. In order for a directory to grow, it needs listings and content. Without listings, well....it's not even a directory. Charging too high a price at the beginning will definitely stun it's growth. And another thing, it needs more promotion and advertising to get it's name out there.
In my opinion, they should not even offer the regular and featured listing options. All listings should have a unique article written for it. It adds value to both Ask Directory(content, baby, content!) and to their customers. This way, they can leverage on their strongest point and eat up the competition.
Ask Directory's domain name is registered till 2011 so it should give you some confidence in this directory. I will be very keen to do another review on this directory 6 months down the road. It should be interesting.
If you know any interesting and unique directories, please email me @ admin (AT) blong (DOT) info so that I can copy, err....I mean review them.
You might want to take a look at our other reviews as well:
- Detailed Review on Alive Directory
- Detailed Review on Aviva Directory
- Detailed Review on GoGuides Directory
- Detailed Review on SevenSeek Directory
- Detailed Review on Octopedia Directory
- Detailed Review on Skaffe Directory
- Detailed Review on Index-It Directory
- Detailed Review on Wow Directory
- Detailed Review on DirSpace Directory
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