Posted on Tuesday, 4th August 2009 by admin
Many premium directory owners believe that directory script owners should not give away free version of the script. Script owners provide free scripts hoping that directory owners will get a chance to experience a subset of feature with the free script and they will be inclined to buy the paid version. The approach is very similar to shareware approach but without any expiry date for the script.
The free versions however are being used by many fly-by-night free directories because the script doesn’t cost anything, hosting is cheap and many hosts allow unlimited sites in their packages. Someone can make 100s of directories with free scripts by just buying domains in bulk (and that’s exactly some people have been doing). Maintaining 100s of directories is of course very difficult and hence automated approvals are the only method to keep these directories active. All these activities are giving a bad name to directory industry and premium directory owners suffer most because of this.
I personally think free versions are good specially for free general directories when new webmasters are just using their new directory to get a feel of the industry and work required to promote a directory. Some people always manage to abuse anything that’s good and that’s exactly what is happening with these free directory scripts. But these directories will die a natural death and people will be discouraged to make more directories if submitters decide not to use these type of directories.
What do you think about free versions of directory scripts?
Tags: directory industry, free directories, Scripts
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (4)
August 13th, 2009 at 12:59 am
I got your point. however in some free directory, if they don’t really admin those, people can really look the directories and that make people don’t want to submit to them.
Ruri@Free article directory´s last blog ..Developing A Good PPC Advertising Campaign
August 13th, 2009 at 9:55 am
I have seen many free directories that auto approve submissions. I recommend people to look at the ‘latest links’ page to see the kind of sites directory has been approving.
August 14th, 2009 at 2:28 am
I used the free version of PHPLD when I first set up my directory, but decided to upgrade to the paid version after a couple of weeks, just because I wanted the premium features.
I totally agree though that it’s too easy to set up a lod of auto-accept directory link farms and this has huge negative impact on all genuine directory owners. I’m not sure that the lack of free scripts would stop this though. It’s not difficult to find illegal copies of paid scripts and many of the offshore spam directories would probably just resort to using those instead.
January 12th, 2010 at 11:32 pm
You’ve got your point of using free script but we can’t blame webmaster to use them right? Still there are some individuals uses it and taking an advantage of it.
Practically it is very tempting to use free script to take it as an advantage.