I realize I am playing both sides of the fence here, but directories are getting a bad rap. Directories in and of themselves are not necissarily bad neighborhoods or whatever, but what some people call directories, and some of the stupid or greedy things that people are doing with directories are making them match the profiles of scraper sites and other sites search engines would not want to index.

Not too long ago a person launched no 2 or 3 but 5 different general directories using the same linkage data. Well that is probably an example of the types of things to avoid.

Some directories have 10,000 pages and only 300 listings. Duplicate content filters are not going to want to keep that site in the index.

Some directory owners build all their link popularity from other free directories and forum signature files. Some directories have no quality standards and do not even properly categorize the sites. Others fail in both categories: inbound link quality and outbound link quality.

Many directories sell sitewide pharmacy or debt consolidation links. In doing that they parse out a ton of their link popularity, which means less of their pages stay in the search index, the lower category pages have less value, and there is less reason for search engines to want to trust any link from that site. When you sell lots of off topic junk the site becomes ghettofied and the path the site must go down is chosen.

If you believe in the good link vs bad link algorithms some engines may have then it would make sense to steer clear from most the sites that excessively exhibit many of the above characteristics, but not all directories are built that way.

Many directory owners do not try to be unique and market their position with anything other than raw PageRank. The more a directory looks like a discount PageRank brokering service without quality standards the more likely search engines will be to want to discount the sites.

We the pundints, us with blogs, and spare times to chat on forums, need to have something to talk about. So we raise an issue up and the knock it down and then hunt on the prowl for the next issue to talk about.

Everything comes and goes in waves like that as the algorithms evolve.

When people talk about directories dying they are stating that algorithms are moving away from them more and more, but for a significant period of time the ROI on directory listings was absurdly great. Even if it drops off somewhat the search engines still have to trust something. In many industries outside of a DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory link there are less than a handful of sites worth trusting. How do search algorithms rank sites in those kinds of industries? They need to trust something.

Even if Google was not placing significant weighting on directory links I still would use many of them for how they work in the other search algorithms, but with that being said it may also be worth looking more into other sources of link popularity as the business model of junk general directories is dying.

I think the business models that will work the best longterm will be those that have a strong social position in their marketplace, those who can afford to advertise a ton, those who can get media coverage, or those that naturally pick up the random citation on random blogs and community driven sites that provide many random unrequested links. Not every business fits in those groups though. The end goal should be to figure out how to get in those groups, but until placed in those groups we do what we have to to get by :)

I wanted to interview Jim Boykin, from WeBuildPages a while ago, but some of my questions were evil and it took a while to get around to do the interview. I recently came up with a new list and asked Jim many SEO business related questions, in large part because he runs one of the few SEO companies that I feel comfortable refering leads to. At the recent WebmasterWorld conference I had not one, but two different people come up to me and thank me for refering them, which makes me feel great for recommending them.

In our interview Jim gives lots of good web design and link building tips, and he also confirmed the rumour that WeBuildPages will be entering the original content production market!

To me it seemed like that market was waiting for more competition, especially considering that some of the other networks that do it place competing ads on the same pages that webmasters pay to have create.

Read the full interview: Aaron Wall interviews Jim Boykin, founder of We Build Pages.

WebmasterWorld has a [subscription required] thread titled What books have impacted your life the most?.

Many people recommended Rich Dad Poor Dad, however it was also mentioned that it's author might have a somewhat sketchy story. I find that critique to be amazingly in depth and link worthy.

If you can get people to buy what you are selling it does not matter that it could be based on pure garbage, illusionary success marketed hard enough becomes self reinforcing.

As people get more successful their departure from reality grows larger. The truth is that some people enjoy being lied to, and so people embelish more and more:

In his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, historian Daniel J. Boorstin said, "[P.T.] Barnum's great discovery was not how easy it is to deceive the public, but rather how much the public enjoyed being deceived."

While some people love being lied to, others love debunking. If the market for a person, place, company, or idea grows large enough there is a huge market in discounting it. At the same time, as people write more they leave a longer trail of facts that can be cross compared.

As their popularity (and link popularity) grow so will the link popularity of their biggest debunkers (so long as their research and debunking is done well).

I am heavily weighting the idea of creating physical books and whether or not to sell them on other sites. John T. Reed, the above mentioned debunker, has wrote a book called How to Write, Publish, and Sell Your Own How-To Book.

His site looks like rubbish, and his sales copy says:

The Internet changes everything. Previously, selling your own book without the help of distributors and book stores was difficult. But with the Internet, you just put up a Web site and the orders flow in continuously. Typically, you will sell your first copy within hours of your Web site being known to the search engines.

If the content is full of B/S then it is sure to be a link popularity hit creating a review page debunking the debunker :)

From personal experience I certainly did not sell my first copy within hours, and that sounds like a load of crap (unless hours means hundreds or thousands of hours, you already have a strong brand, or know how to do pay per click marketing well), but the book might have some useful content in it.

I have actually wrote a couple ebooks, and have deleted the other one because I did not want it to interfere with the branding of this site. I did sell a few of the other ebook, but not too many. Understanding a bit about current search algorithms I can tell you that most websites will not sell their first ebook in the first hour. I didn't sell many until I built trust and brand value.

Some other sites selling search related ebooks claim hundreds of sales a week, (recently updating sales volumes from 10,000 to 30,000) but few sites are as heavily trafficed as ThreadWatch and SearchEngineWatch. In the last two days I got mentions on both of those and Danny Sullivan even mentioned my ebook in a podcast and my volume is still nowhere remotely close to that 200 per week rate.

I probably should write and distribute a few more articles, and do some more pay per click marketing. I have also been seeing a number of dictionary type sites used to drive traffic. Maybe I will also learn a few good sales tips from John T. Reed.

I have been hoping to create a few SEO tools and am doing many interviews to help gather SEO war stories from some of the best minds in search. That will help broaden the collective voice of my ebook. Later today I will post an interview of Jim Boykin from WeBuildPages, and I still want to interview a couple dozen more people. Eventually the interviews will get formatted into a bonus download with the ebook.

With the recent mentions my sales have went way up, but that certainly does not make my book any better than it was last week. I still can make it much better. My end goal is to continue to learn more about search and writing to where my book could hopefully end up on some of the books that have impacted your life most type threads. A lofty goal no doubt, but I still am having a lot of fun and learning a bunch :)

While not insecure about money issues, there is no doubt Seth Godin is one of many ego driven bloggers:

I don't blog to make money. I don't run ads on my site. I don't even blog to win awards. I blog because it pleases me to see my ideas spread. I like it when I see people talking about one of my ideas--without even mentioning where the idea came from. That means it's the idea that spread, not my brand. Which is the whole point.

For me, anyway. Not for you or for her or for him.

And that's the tricky part about marketing to ego. Everybody feeds their ego in a different way.

While I sell an ebook on this site I am sorta the same way on that front, entirely ego driven. I like helping people and I like links.

A friend of mine asked me how much money was my goal for the year and I said I will measure my success in HTML links. He told me I could get that with blogspam and FFA pages, but I believe those are only part of a well rounded link building campaign ;)

Think I am a bit behind for the month (stuck at #34 for Aaron in Goolge), so here is to a good August...Aaron Aaron Aaron Aaron Aaron Aaron Aaron Aaron

On a related note, congrats to Gurtie, who already owns 6 of the top 7 Google Gurtie results. She recently stopped targeting TheGurtster because, as she states, "it was too easy".

In a recent Fast Company article Sergey Brin stated that he thought Google still has the ability to attract the right kind of people because they have the ability to feed their ego:

"Here's the way I think of it," he says. "Is this the place I would want to work if I were graduating from a PhD program now?" Brin and Larry Page were pursuing doctorates at Stanford when they founded Google, which they now run together with Eric Schmidt, a veteran executive who had worked at Sun and Novell.

"Yes," he answers. Why? The key reason is that Google lets brilliant computer scientists work on "great technical problems" that provide the intellectual stimulation and challenge they crave. "Artificial intelligence, complex systems, user interface -- all the things I studied as a graduate student, we hit the limits of," he says.

What fills your ego? Do your offers fill the egos of those you want to do business with?

Which has greater value to an SEO:

• seeing an accurate indication of PageRank (connectivity data) -or-

• predicting what the social importance of a site or idea should be and will eventually go to (perhaps even before the site or idea is launched)

Sometimes our own successes hold us back (as we fear change and need to be financially viable until we land the really good ideas). I have a killer idea, but am unsure when I will have enough time and motivation to do it.

I want to rebrand a site soon, I am currently building at least 3 or 4 SEO tools (one of them is taking way longer than I intended), I will be going on at least 4 trips in the next 2 months, and I may have Jury duty in October. Meanwhile I have to blog away, update my ebook, read at least 3 books, interview about 15 people, do SEO for a few websites, start exercising again, and get a hair cut. :)