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If you go to the directory itself and navigate to a category, then click submit on the right it gives you an option for a free submission. I had the same issue myself until I realized that.

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thanks! I'll give that a try! we do have several blogs!

Just updated our "About Us" page. Thank you for sharing that. I believe that will help significantly!

If anyone is curious to see it, it is here: http://www.aboutus.org/ApplesOfGold.com

true. thank you for the response!

Well, I'm thankful that I submitted my main website about 10 years ago or so when it was a lot cheaper! And that has remained in there.

I was considering submitting another site, but the other site is not a money-maker at this point, and is more of a personal hobby to some degree, so not worth the fee. If it was $69 like before, I may have considered, and definitely it was still PR6.

Wondering when and why it went to PR4.

Clearly, we see that high authority directories like Dmoz.Org are effective, even if this big monster is practically dead because of how unresponsive it is.

What about other free directories? Is it worth obtaining as many listings as possible in the free directories? what about the paid ones? Is this still good SEO strategy if the directories have at least a PR3-4 or many cases higher?

I'm asking this for an established site, so I understand that it won't help for deep-linking and anchor text, but will it help anyway to get links from these?

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I noticed that BOTW.org has gone from a historic PR6 to a PR4 currently.

They also have gone up significantly in price for $69 or so to $149 annually or $299 one-time fee.

This is quite high and with PR4 now, I'm not sure if it's really worth submitting to for this price.

Agree / Disagree?

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A question regarding Google Shopping: Our product feed went offline for several months because Google updated their feed specifications and we were no longer listed in their Google shopping search results.

We correct this problem about 2-3 days ago and in webmaster tools it says that our products are now live and everything seems OK, but ...

When we search our domain name, applesofgold.com in Google and click on the "Shopping tab" none of our products come up.

• We used to also have a 5 Star rating that would show with our Google listings and these don't show anymore ever since our google shopping feed went offline.

I was hoping it would start showing up again. Does it just take longer or are we missing something?

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Personally, I think Google+ is trying to get more attention with going "red" to make it more noticeable. They're having a hard time competing against Facebook and Pinterest and the like.

I would not mind if Google+ took off, as I believe it would be great for our SEO. But Google is best at search and I believe will remain so.

The general rule is to have no more than 100 links per page, so you can probably increase this page from an SEO stand-point and still be OK.

However, you also want to consider user-experience. Will the page look more tidy or be more functional for the visitor at 25 listings per page or at 50 or a 100?

We recently had a similar issue on a site I was working on at http://babynamesdiary.com/baby-names-and-meanings/ - which uses databases for baby name ideas and we opted to go with 25 names per page, but also included a list of name origins at the bottom (which is like category pages) to help both the visitors to the site and also help our SEO.

What I find is that the best method is a balance of visitor experience and good SEO (but always place visitor experience first and the rest should naturally follow).

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We also had a similar situation the previous week. This week we seem to have stabilized. I'm trying to figure it out myself as we have been steady with our pages, and actually significantly increasing in content and # of pages.

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it is automatic. thanks. see above reply.

we are auto-generating the feed, but our shopping cart doesn't differentiate between different genders and what color a piece of jewelry is, so any added fields like that we would have to add in manually.

To alleviate the issue, for now, we put unisex for the gender and "metal" for the color and it seemed to take.

We are in the jewelry industry, and for Google product feeds, we list our products under "Apparel & Accessories > Jewelry".

As of the new Google feed requirements, they are saying that we have to choose a gender and color for each product that is in the Apparel category.

While this makes sense for clothes, it doesn't exactly for jewelry because many items are for both men and women, and there's not always a color associated with each product.

I can enter some of these fields manually, but with 5,000+ products, it makes it difficult w/ each update.

Anyone have solutions for this? Or a way around it? Can we just include those fields but leave them blank?

Any other solutions?

I use: http://www.aboutmyip.com - it's free and has been reliable.

There are also scripts you can purchase for very little cost and have them install it for you on your server and set up a cron job to have your sitemap run automatically each week and ping the search engines to find your sitemap.

One such service is at xml-sitemaps.com - they can install it for you and set up the cron job as well.

Just make sure you are on a good server that can handle the script if your website is large.

I can't answer you on the reconsideration request and will leave that to someone who can, but I wanted say that in general SEO companies I have found are often expensive and do not always do the quality job that you can do yourself with the right tools. Mostly it's having clean code, good content, and good authority links.

The best thing you can probably do is patiently gain relationships with other websites who will link to you and build good content that others will want to link to; try guest blog posts and keep at it to just keep building.

We have had a quality website for 12 years. We have good rankings and good PR.

But for some reason, I have never been able to get listed on Dmoz.org - it's like they're not even reviewing it. It's not like I got a rejection letter or anything, just a no response and we just can't seem to get listed there. It's almost like the editors for our category are just not responsive or just not around. Or maybe they're a competitor and don't want us listed?

Questions:

1. How important is it for an established site to get listed? I imagine that dmoz being an authority site, it would still be very helpful for rankings.

2. There are dmoz "submission services" - where they claim to list your site the proper way. They don't guarantee their service, since they obviously can't, and you have to pay either way. Does anyone recommend these services and anyone know of a particular one that is up & up?

Any help on getting listed would be appreciated!

Thanks for chiming in. This does clear up quite a bit for me. Ideally, I would like a balance of relevant links & general high authority links.

With that being said, can anyone suggest any high authority sites other than dmoz that I can add my site to that would help?