Do you recognise the following symptoms:

• You accept over 90% of all sites submitted.
• You don’t even visit a site before accepting it.
• You threw up a free template (or don’t even bother doing that).
• You have never edited the description text of a submitted site.
• You sell sitewide links to anybody (yes really anybody)
• The only value you have is pr and a seo friendly link.
• Your principal source of income is the partner links from other directories.
• You have no idea what value you provide to the site visitor (but you keep your fingers crossed that they click on that adsense block)

Oh god, I recognise these symptoms. I should since I am the owner of a general directory… God save my soul from the purgatory that the search engines will surely make me enter.

Feel free to comment and suggest other symptoms….

If for the end user you add no value, how long do you think it will be before the big 3 search engines also decide that your general directory is not very relevant and stop appearing in there results?

If the only value you offer is a seo friendly link to a site owner, and nothing else, seems to me that your directory is waiting to become considered a spam link farm.

Pisst anyone interested in a pr3 free link (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean, know what I mean)