This web directory blog is a new addition to this website. I'd like to use the blog to a) keep everyone informed about what we are up to with this directory and b) keep track of link building initiaves on my never ending quest to promote this website. And last but not least I'd like to use this blog to give webmasters the opportunity to see our statistics . For now we do not accept any comments to this blog. If you like to comment a message, please use our helpdesk to submit a ticket with your comment.

Latest Blog entries

09-18-2006

The Guidelines

It seems like that guidelines do not matter and some people think every directory owner is just desperate about accepting paid submissions - no matter how bad the submitted website is. We put some easy to understand guidelines in place to cut down on submissions that do not fit our directory. Over the last few weeks we still had some people submitting websites that absolutely did not fit our guidelines. Well, we are sticking to our submission guidelines and we are actively declining these submissions. Making money is good and we all enjoy it, but the short-term pleasure we would get from accepting websites that do not really fit into our directory, would hurt us in the long-term. Therefore we refund the money and decline the submissions.

09-16-2006
A "site:" command on Google.com for this directory (site:the-usa.net) now shows 928 indexed pages for me. That is an awesome result considering that we blew away the old directory software and started from scratch.

09-04-2006

Happy Labor Day. I hope everyone is having a nice long weekend. And again another month of the year 2006 is over. Only 4 months left until the end of the year. If your website receives a lot of traffic during the upcoming Christmas season now is the time to make the last important changes. This will ensure search engines can spider and index the data properly.

09-02-2006

Traffic Review - August 2006

It's the first of the month and we are going to review the traffic stats of this directory for the month of July. Just to recap - the domain "the-usa.net" was a non-promoted web directory since 2005. Early this summer we decided to scrap the old, non-se-friendly directory and replace it with the latest version of PHPLinkDirectory and to start promoting it. We expect to see the real results of the promotion to kick in later in August and of course when it comes to the next Google Page Rank update.

1) Overall traffic month to month

Traffic (unique visitors) in August went up a little bit, while the number of visitors and the number of page views went down. While these numbers look a little disappointing on a first look, I think that these numbers better reflect a normal traffic flow. I could come up with excuses like during summer traffic always goes down, etc.! Honestly I think that the directory still has to find its place in search engine indexes. We also removed a large number of categories and deleted some free listings that were no longer active or appropriate. Let's jump into a little more detail of our stats for the month of August.

2) Traffic Source

Where does our traffic come from? The next screenshot shows the different traffic referrers that send people our way. There is still almost no traffic coming from Yahoo or MSN, it is good to see Google to be a good source of traffic to "The-USA.net". Compared to last month the number is down a little bit, but Google rankings always fluctuate. However - other sources are picking up to deliver traffic. Very interesting to see: The Kingbloom directory listing for us is actually a good source of traffic. Our listing in Alivedirectory is also showing up in the referrer list.

The referrers overwritten in red are some of my other websites that I use to link to the directory. Please disregard those.

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Blog Archive

August 2006
July 2006