| Detailed Review: Octopedia Directory |
Detailed Review: Octopedia DirectoryDate Reviewed: 10-03-2007Name: Octopedia Directory URL: http://www.octopedia.com Type: General PageRank: 5/10  Looks & Design: It's a squid. No it's an octopus. Well, whatever it is, I have nothing much to say about the design. Very simple, neat and stylish layout with that octopus logo on the top. And it looks professional. The colours they used mix very well too. On the frontpage, it displays the main categories and some of the subcategories. Although it looks like this directory has very few categories available, if you go into their categories, they have more subcategories there than what is shown on the frontpage. They have no advertisements on their frontpage. But there are some sitewide textlinks at the bottom on other pages. Well, at least they don't have any distracting banner advertisements right? Functionality: To submit your listings, you first need to create an account. The account creation is pretty simple, just key your username, email and password, then proceed to pay your money. Yes, a bit troublesome but overall not such a bother. The reason for this is because they offer 2 submissions per account, so you do need an account to do your second submission. And if your site gets rejected, you can submit another site by logging in again. I think it could be easier by just halving the price per submission but I guess this is probably a marketing strategy on the part of Octopedia. After reviewing directories for a while, I thought that I have seen it all. But Octopedia really surprises me. It has some very unique features which I will cover now. First of all, you can have "in-content" links which can be different from your site title. For example, if your site title is "Jack's Games Gallery", you can have a link to your site with the anchor text (up to 4 words) "Free Online RPG Games" on the site description itself. And you can have up to 8 internal links to other sections of your site with proper anchor text (I love deeplinks!). Finally, a directory that understands what webmasters want and need. You can also submit the same URL to different categories. However, Octopedia limits site descriptions to 250 characters which I feel is a letdown. There are some listings with a 4 word description (Massage. massage health fitness.). As I mentioned before, Octopedia doesn't have much category choices for their users. And they do not have deep levels of category (up to 2 levels only). This compared to some of the larger directories with extremely deep categories. In some ways, this is a good thing. If a directory has too many categories, the PageRank to these categories may get diluted. And it is pretty difficult to get to as well. Clicking and clicking into the deeper levels is only meant for huge directories. Going through their categories, you can see that they do limit their listings per category to 30. But since they have very limited categories, some of these categories are crowded (some with as much as 166 listings). And since listings are sorted by date, new listings will get a better boost. While the older ones will be pushed behind. This don't bode well since this directory is growing pretty fast. For a popular category, you could see your listings getting pushed way behind in a matter of months. If you are interested to know, the "+" sign on the category title is to inform users that there are very recent listings added into the category. Took me a while to figure that one out. I had thought it was to collapse or to expand the category tree. It is also surprising that when you submit your listings, it will immediately be displayed without any editor to approve it. I think perhaps after a day or so, only then an editor will come along and see whether it will be rejected or not. I believe it would be better for Octopedia to hold any submissions first and only after an editor has approved the site, display it on their directory. But I guess this is a dilemma for Octopedia. Octopedia's search is also quite impressive, considering what other directory offers. After you have searched for a term, you can continue to narrow the results down using their "narrow Search". It seems to me that all the listings on the directory are paid listings and are submitted by third parties. If so, it means that Octopedia doesn't hire editors to add in useful or some "authority" sites into their directory. Not good for anyone searching for information in Octopedia. Worse still, other than it's relatively small amount of listings, Octopedia doesn't have anything else. Not even a blog. The squid gets bored you know. Price: Permanent, one time payment for 2 sites submission - US$25. Subsequent submissions - US$20 for 2. Search Engine Friendliness: Hmmm.....it looks like Octopedia got hurt badly during the previous public PageRank (PR) Updates. Although I seldom dwell into the past, if I am not wrong I have to mention that this used to be a PR 7 directory. Now it is a PR 5 Directory. That's a very huge drop. Not sure what they have done, but it seemed to have pissed off Google. I hope they have solved whatever the problem is and all is well again. Octopedia's frontpage has a PR of 5 while all it's main categories have a PR of 4. For the rest of subcategories, most of them have a PR value of 4 and a few having PR values of 3. Pretty ok I guess. But if you are looking to increase your site's PR, this site is just not the solution anymore. And there is no such thing as a "featured listing" to keep your listings at the top. Although they limit their listings to 30 per page, as this directory grows (and it will because it is pretty cheap), and your listings get pushed to further and further behind, the PR flow to your listings will diminish signifcantly. Some of the detail pages have a PageRank of 3 though. It is interesting to note that Octopedia doesn't have any page with a PR of 1. I kid you not. Browse through yourself. Try as I might, I couldn't find a single page with PR 1 on this directory. At the time of writing, Octopedia has around 5,110 pages indexed by Google and about 500 backlinks according to Google. I am very surprised that Google has very little of Octopedia's backlinks recognized. Yahoo seems to like Octopedia a little better. According to Yahoo, Octopedia has around 11,000 backlinks. But I believe that Google does recognize those backlinks, it just doesn't show them. So this site should be spidered by Search Engines pretty often. Of those 5,110 pages indexed by Google, a significant number of them are in supplemental pages, mainly because Octopedia doesn't block "keyword" search results from Search Engine Spiders. And this also means that the number of indexed pages are probably inflated. Improvement in rankings is what this directory can really help you in. This directory allows you to place anchor text in your site descriptions (the link is surrounded by descriptive text). These anchor text can contain important keywords or keyphrases that are different from your site title. And Octopedia allows you to have up to 8 links with anchor text to your internal pages. Yes, more keywords and keyphrases as well. Very innovative and very useful for better rankings for those terms. Thumbs up for Octopedia for breaking out of the directory mold. However, if you were to browse through their category page, you will see that the link to a listing's site has no anchor text. It's just an image with the words "Visit". I wonder why they do that? Won't it be better for Search Engine Optimization to provide some anchor text or even use the site tile for it instead of a button image? However, they do have a link to the site on the site description. But it's still a waste of a link. Octopedia doesn't have any meta description on their category pages at all. Yes, that's right. None. But due to the fact that it doesn't have a lot of categories and the pages are updated often (due to submissions), there are very few supplemental pages due to this. However, I think it would be better for Octopedia to have unique meta descriptions for their category pages. Anyway, it probably won't take up a lot of time and effort since this directory has a small number of categories. Octopedia limits their site descriptions to just 250 characters. A lot of their listings have just one line of description (some with just 4 words!). And since they allow up to 8 internal links, their detail page looks more like a links page rather than a detail page. Having very little text and a lot of links will definitely not make your detail page look attractive to Search Engines. Worse still, with their limited number of listings (relative of course) it means that there isn't a lot of "things" Search Engine can index. And other than listings, they are "content-less". It's just my speculation of course, but it could be why Google stripped them off the high PageRank? Value: Yes, it's cheap. US$12.50 for one listing on a PR5 directory! I am pretty sure you won't get any better for value deal elsewhere. I may be exaggerating a bit on this, but I think that it is really a good deal. You won't get much traffic from here and I doubt will you get any significant boost in your site's PR but it will help for ranking purposes. Overall: Not bad. I think it could be better but still certainly worth to take a look at. The low price makes it very attractive and hard to ignore. Comments: It definitely needs a lot more content. But this directory gets my vote. This is a pretty innovative directory. I await to see what new features they have in store. However if you do want to get listed there make sure you make full use of it's services. I have seen listings on this directory that don't even list their internal links and some have very poor anchor text. What a waste. 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 SevenSeek Directory - Detailed Review on Skaffe Directory - Detailed Review on GoGuides Directory & Search - Detailed Review on Ask Directory - Detailed Review on Index-It Directory - Detailed Review on Wow Directory |