| Detailed Review: SevenSeek Directory |
This is a modified review. You can view the old review here.Detailed Review: SevenSeek Directory Date Reviewed: 02-03-2007 Update: 06-03-2007
Name: SevenSeek Directory
URL: http://www.sevenseek.com
Type: General
PageRank: 6/10
Looks & Design: A much better design that their previous one. Really much better. Good colour matching and very neat and sleek layout. I like the logo as well. However, their categories visited links seem to have the same colour as their main categories in Internet Explorer. Not too sure whether this was intentional or not. If you have nothing else to do, try clicking on every subcategory displayed on the frontpage and you will see it appears a bit weird. And in Internet Explorer, the footer links are out. Heard that it will be solved soon, so no worries there. And the About Us Page doesn't work all the time for Internet Explorer. I have no problems in Firefox though. One small point to know, the featured listings/sponsored listings now look more prominment because of the red font colours. Just a little heads up if you are looking to get a featured listing here.
With this new design, gone is the banner advertisement on the frontpage. It really looks more professional now without the banners. Those footer links still remain though.
Functionality: There is no frontpage submission for their listings. You can click on "HOW to add website" to learn. But I can give you a crash course here. In order for you to submit your listing, you need to browse to the category (as deep as possible) and THEN click on "ADD website". Tedious step here. There are 3 options for you to submit. There are "Website", "Webpage" and "Sponsored Listing" options available. The difference between website and webpage is that webpage allows you to deeplink (which is always a good thing). I definitely like this idea of allowing a single internal link instead of just linking to the frontpage. This means that they allow their clients to submit different "webpages" with different descriptions to different categories. A lot of other directories which allow deeplinking only accepts a single site description for all the internal links.
SevenSeek has a decent amount of categories and subcategories, although a majority of them are at the Business & Industry category. But it is interesting to note that they don't have a lot of listings in the Business & Industry Category. Majority of their listings are concentrated at the Computer category. I stopped counting the number of listings on some of the subcategories however I am sure they have more than 50 listings on some of them. SevenSeek sticks all their category listings into a single page, that includes "Sponsored listings", "Webpages" and "Websites". Thus your listing could possibly be stuck at the bottom of pile of websites. So be very careful of which category you choose to submit your site to. Worse, I have no idea how SevenSeek arranges their listing. Very likely, it would be arranged by date of submission. At the bottom, there will always be some listings which seems to be from Searches.
If you browse through the directory, you would realize that Aviva Directory seems to have a large number of listings on this directory. No points for guessing who the new owner is. Previously, it was owned (or a part of) by V7 Networks.
I also realize that in their directory, they have a site with the URL: "http://www.1-corel-software-discount-microsoft-oem-symantec-software.com"! A classic example of a spammy URL. But somehow it got into the "professionally edited" SevenSeek Directory. However to SevenSeek's defence, the site seems to be a legitimate online software retail outlet. Sometimes I just don't understand how does someone choose their domain name.
SevenSeek's College V2 (PR5 Blog) is a blog on college life and stuff which I have all but forgotten. It's updated pretty constantly (nearly everyday) until 6th of Feburary 2007. Then it just stopped. Why? I have no idea. Perhaps it is the holidays or perhaps Julie met a new guy. Although the blog is interesting, I don't think it will stand out from the other blogs out there. Other than the blog, SevenSeek doesn't have much of a content. The number of listings they have isn't impressive like GoGuides either. Note that SevenSeek accepts adult sites, which for some, it is quality "content" enough.
SevenSeek has a very interesting 3-sentence Philosophy if you are interested.
Price: Permanent, one time payment. 3 options available. Webpages & Website Option - US$40, Sponsored Listing - US$99.95
Sevenseek accepts both paypal and 2CO payments.
Search Engine Friendliness: Ok, I have often complained about the lack of unique meta descriptions among the categories of directories. SevenSeek goes one step further, they have NO meta descriptions! This will not bode well for empty categories especially for a template based script like SevenSeek. But at least SevenSeek has the presence of mind to make sure that Search Engines don't index their submission page (every category has it's own submission page).
At the time of writing, SevenSeek has 4,820 pages indexed by Google and has about 37,600 backlinks (again this is never an accurate figure). These are respectable figures. So if you are worried that SevenSeek doesn't get spider often enough, you can put your mind at ease. This and the fact that SevenSeek doesn't have deep category levels (SevenSeek has the maximum of 3 levels), you will surely be seeing Search Engine crawlies coming to your site very soon. However with that said, if you were to check carefully some of the inner categories, there are empty ones. And surprisingly a number of these empty categories turn up supplemental in Google. And supplemental pages don't get spidered by Google very often. So I guess if you are unlucky enough to get listed in such a category, it may take a while for Google to find your site through SevenSeek. I am sure that is not what you are looking for when you submit to a directory. Thus I think that this issue has to be solved pretty quick by the new owners of SevenSeek, either through more backlinks to those categories or by adding more content.
The front page of SevenSeek has a PR Value of 6. Most of it's main categories have a PR value of 4, while it's subcategories have a PR Value of 3 to 4. There are many empty categories with a pretty high PR just waiting for you to exploit. But then the popular categories are already quite crowded, some of them with over 50 listings on the page. So if you are looking for that PR boost, you should think carefully before committing.
I also realize that SevenSeek may have canonical issues. Unlike most Search Engine Friendly sites nowadays, SevenSeek doesn't do that 301 redirect for one of it's domain names (with or without the "www"). But somehow Google seem to index only one of them (the domain with the "www"). Hopefully it won't have any duplicate content problem due to this.
Another thing I must point out, the site description for each listing is limited to 200 characters. Why? If content is what Search Engines look for, then having more text in the description will be better, for both the listings and Search Engines. I always find this limit of text puzzling to say the least. You should be allowed to have at least 500 to 800 characters for your description. However, you can write different titles and descriptions for your internal links through the Webpage Option. But like most quality directory, the title you can use is restricted to the webpage's title, it gives very little leeway for you to optimize your anchor text.
SevenSeek has 2 external sitewide links, while the frontpage footer has 3 external links. Both sitewides are pointing to V7 Network sites and having 2 external sitewide links is reasonable in my opinion. Not too much PR leak. And it doesn't look messy or spammy either.
Value: I think SevenSeek is a mixed bag. If you are looking for some PR love, you can get some here. But Alive Directory is a better deal. The sponsored lising won't be much help either seeing that the SevenSeek keeps all it's listings on a single page. And getting listed in the main categories (with their higher PR) is not guaranteed. You may get pushed to a subcategory. Furthermore, there are far too many listings on the popular pages. If you are looking for traffic, unless you are a webmaster related site, you will be disappointed. The lack of content and listings means that there will not be a lot of people searching in the directory. The best thing about SevenSeek, it allows you to deeplink with the proper unique description. As I mentioned before, you can have different listings on different categories pointing to internal links and this will surely help you improve your rankings.
In the past, due to the popularity of V7 Network and SevenSeek being part of this network, it has very likely pushed a lot of traffic to SevenSeek. But now, after SevenSeek is sold (Guess who owns it? Think "butt"), I expect to see a reduction of traffic and interest. But surprisingly, SevenSeek is still being advertised as being part of V7 Network (read the frontpage footer and visit V7N's website). So with the reputation of V7 Network behind it and IF your site is webmaster related, I think getting listed in SevenSeek will help your site in regards to both traffic and improvement in rankings. However, if it is not webmaster related (or even IT related), then you should look elsewhere.
A reduction of the cost of submission will really help level the playing field for SevenSeek among these big name directories.
Overall: Mixed bag. Definitely not the best, but no slouch itself especially in the webmaster arena. However, there are better value-for-value directories out there, for example Aviva Directory.
Comments: Lack of quality content. Lack of quality listings. My opinion is that SevenSeek need more of both to stand out. And with all the hype about SevenSeek, I am slightly disappointed with this directory.
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 Skaffe Directory
- Detailed Review on Octopedia Directory
- Detailed Review on Ask Directory
- Detailed Review on Index-It Directory
- Detailed Review on Wow Directory
- Detailed Review on DirSpace Directory
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