One of the first directories that I started was Nima Directory. It uses phpLD and has a custom made template. I spent decent deal of money and time improving and marketing it.
In the beginning it returned the investment very good. At one point it went up to Pagerank 4 and was makeking close to $1000 a month on it. However, similar to many other directories Nima Directory was dropped by Google. Almsot all of its pages were (and are) listed on Google. However it did not rank for the term “Nima Directory“. Google also dropped the directorie’s pagerank to zero.
This act of Google was widely assumed to be a penalty for rapid link building (sponsoring many templates, buying many sitewide links, etc). It was during the same time that Google started penalizing websites for selling or buying text links.
After Nima Directory lost it’s position and some rankings I stopped working on it much. I was really hoping that Google would take the penalties away after a short time and I would be able to get the directory back to it’s good position. That has not happened yet!
So I decided to test what I had seen some of my friend do. I redirected NimaDirectory.com to NimaDirectory.net. I don’t expect my Pagerank 4 and full Google ranking to come back before next Google update. However I do expect to be able to start building the ranking without the penalty affecting it.
Right now Nima Directory has a free submission option which also offers deep links too. This will be the case until there are 1000 listings on there – so take advantage of it while it lasts.
I will post updates on this matter as time goes on as to whether this strategy was successful or not. Feel free to post your comments or experiences in this matter as well.
