| Detailed Review: Index-It Directory |
Detailed Review: Index-It DirectoryDate Reviewed: 23-03-2007Name: Index-It Directory URL: http://www.index-it.net Type: General PageRank: 6/10 (Mainpage)  Looks & Design: First looks - plain. It has a full width logo on top and well...that's all I can say about the design. What do you expect, this is a directory after all. Also displayed on the frontpage are the categories and subcategories, as well as news feeds at the bottom. They do not have any flashy banner advertisements, but they do have some footer links. And instead of just footer links, they are surrounded by text explanations about those sites. It looks like those big business sites where they have something like a disclaimer on the footer. Certainly a good move here. Gives me a feeling that it is not an actual advertisement. These frontpage footer links are not sitewide links. However, they do have sitewide links on other pages. Functionality: You can't submit your site to Index-it directly from the frontpage. What you need to do is to browse into a suitable category and click on "SUbmit Your Site" to submit to Index-it. Then you proceed to key in your site details. That's a bit troublesome. Looking at the submission itself, you can have only up to 200 characters for your site description. That's just too bad. But they do allow you to have keywords in your title. Index-it also offers a featured listing option, but with a slight twist. For this featured listing, you get the top spots for the category and you get a "Company info" page in which you can have a site description without any character limit! No, I am serious. So I guess you can submit a 5,000 word site description here with all the juicy keywords and keyphrases. Furthermore, you can have up to 15 links to other websites or 15 internal links (deeplinks). And all these includes anchor text and furthermore, these links are in the site description (of the "Company Info" Page) itself. There is a featured listing page where all these featured listings will be displayed as well. The site descriptions in the featured listing page/category page can be different from that in the "Company Info" page. Browsing through the directory, I have seen a number of listings making full use of this featured listing by linking to other sites as well. Beautifully done. Only fault I can find with this, you have to send an email requesting this featured listing. There is no automated payment script to set it up. It is good to note that Index-it offers free listings to sites related to religion as well as sites offering "free stuff". Index-it has a pretty small number of categories and subcategories. Their number of listings isn't impressive either. And it's category display is a bit confusing. Let's say if you browse into the Computer main category and then click on Computer repair, you will shown to the Computer repair subcategory. But the Computer repair link is still there. Not a big problem, but confusing nevertheless. For their category level, the maximum I can find is 3 levels, which is just right for a directory of this size. Bad thing, some categories are completely empty. And some of the categories have very confusing and weird titles, like "seo-friendly directories" and "internet web directories" inside the directory category. I have to mention that Index-it has a subcategory called weight loss. Why? I don't know. Index-it limits their listings per page to 10 and there are no extremely crowded categories as of yet. The most listings I can find is about 13 listings which is in the directory category. This directory surely needs more listings and more content to be called a directory. Having a blog or even a article section will improve this site's overall value. I have browse through Index-it's categories pages and taken a look at some of their listings, the quality is reasonable enough. I didn't find any spammy sites nor did I find any dead links. And they do have some useful sites on the categories, just that there isn't much of them to be useful. Index-it uses Google search even for searching it's internal listing. This would mean that they will have to wait till Google actually indexes and caches the pages before it can be searched for. They should have their own little search function which will probably be faster and more accurate. I wonder why they chose to use only Google search instead? I would agree that having RSS feeds on some pages would help, especially if that particular page has no content. But Index-it has RSS feeds on nearly every page, that includes the "Company Info" page. And worse, those feeds are placed on top! This is very distracting when the main aim of the "Company Info" page is to provide more information on that listing and not to drive the visitors away to other sites with more interesting news. They should also limit the feeds to empty categories or only on the main categories. With that being said, the RSS feeds they provide are very relevant to the subject at hand. For example, if you were to browse to the Travel Category, the feeds will be on travel related topics. Same for Health Category and others. I am however, not sure how Index-it arranges their listings, very likely it would be by the date of submission. Another thing, this site loads fast. Well, at least from my end. Other than not being able to join the other cool kids at the lunch table, a site with very little graphics has it's good points. Fast loading site is good for their visitors and good for search engines as well. There are 4 sitewide links at the bottom. But not to worry, they are not too distracting at all. Price: Permanent, one time payment. Regular listing - US$20, Featured Listing - US$40. Search Engine Friendliness: The frontpage of this directory has a PR value of 6, while most of it's categories have a PR value of 4 to 5. And their PR is pretty consistent among the categories (although there are a few exceptions). They have different sitemaps (8 in total) for different categories and these sitemaps have a PR Value of 5, definitely good for pushing PR to those category pages! With the fact that the directory isn't crowded, you could certainly get a good PR boost from this directory. I have seen some of the Company Info page having a PR Value of 4 even! I checked the PR Value for the second page of the directory category, it's a PR 4. Same as the first page. So you probably won't lost out on PR much even when you get listed on the second page. Impressive to say the least even with 4 sitewide links. However with all these said, this directory is more than just a PR pushing site. At the time of writing, Google has indexed 1,400 pages of Index-it and it has around 12,000 backlinks (not an accurate figure) recognized. And now with Google blocking searching for supplemental results, my manual check for supplemental pages of this site turned up with some of such pages. Usually, those in supplemental are the submit pages. It seems that Index-it does not block their submit pages from Search Engines and this means that their indexed pages are probably not accurate and has a significant amount of duplicated submit pages. However, with that many backlinks, Index-it should be crawled by Search Engine very often. Did I mention that Index-it doesn't have deep level of categories? You can be rest assured that Search Engines will find your link pretty fast. Although this directory has a different meta description for each of their categories, their description aren't unique enough. It's just a simple change with the category titles. Most of the site descriptions for their listings are one-liners as well and for regular listings, they are limited to 200 characters. I have browsed through some of the Company Info pages, although some are pretty well-written, most of them do not have a significant amount of text to really make a difference. Some of the Company Info pages look like a links page. To make matters worse, this directory has a very limited number of listings. Although those RSS feeds can help, but they are just small news sniplets and could possibly be duplicates. This means that there isn't much content for Search Engine to index. In this aspect, I am slightly disappointed. But using RSS Feeds and constantly changing information can attract Search Engines to crawl the site more often. I also realized, even the site logo's alt tags change on every page. The alt tag will probably not give a big boost in terms of ranking, but at the very least, it will help Search Engines figure out what the page topic is about. If you are looking for a way to rank in Search Engines, you have come to the right place, that is if you take the Featured Listing. You can have in-content links with the proper anchor text. You can have a site description loaded with important keywords and keyphrases. You can have deeplinks or even links to other sites in your site description. What else could you possibly want? It is just too bad that they don't promote the featured sites more, like having some of the links to their Company Info page on the frontpage for even more exposure. Or they could have the featured listings displayed in the main categories. Even if you don't take the Featured Listing, Index-it allows you to link to your internal pages and with the proper anchor text, it can still help you in the rankings. I guess it is just too bad, they don't have a "info" page for their regular listings. Value: For a PR6 directory, the price is very good. US$20 for a regular link. You will get a good PR boost and improvements in your ranking. But I think the best value is probably the Featured Listing. For 40 dollars, you get 10 more links (even to other sites) in addition to the PR and rank improvements. Furthermore, you will get more exposure. I think it is certainly value for money. And it is not crowded at the moment. As usual with new and small directories, you won't get much traffic from here. Heck, I doubt anyone will be searching for information through this directory. Just look at the number of listing this directory has. Overall: Found a gem here. A pretty good directory. Lacking content and quality listings but I am sure it will make it up for it in time. Comments: A bit overdone with the RSS Feeds. RSS feeds should be used to complement a site and having the RSS Feeds on the top, makes the listings of the directory less prominent. Worse of all having it everywhere makes a otherwise neat site look messy and clustered. And I don't understand the point of having RSS Feeds on the Company Info Page. In the crowded directory business, this directory still need a lot of promotion and a ton of advertisements for people to take notice. But it is relative cheap and has quite a few good features webmasters can make good use of. 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 Ask Directory - Detailed Review on Skaffe Directory - Detailed Review on Wow Directory - Detailed Review on DirSpace Directory |