Zeal.com Closing Down

March 22nd, 2006 by Chris

Zeal.com, a directory owned by Looksmart (see the review I wrote in 2003 here) is closing down as of March 28th as reported by the SE Roundtable.

I never thought they’d actually close down, but Looksmart/Zeal was only ever important thanks to MSN, and MSN stopped using them quite a while ago, so this was inevitable. Also, Zeal’s structure was the least search engine friendly of all the major directories so being listed didn’t even always get you an incoming link.

Mostly Zeal was a haven for spammers. Their largest contributors were a group of Indians who had a whole army of data entry workers adding tens if not hundreds of thousands of links to their own poorly made sites. I cannot help but smile inwardly at the thought of all that work now being wasted for those people.

What state does this leave the directory community? We have Yahoo, which is still a fairly reliable source of traffic depending on the number of listings in your category, but the yearly fee eliminates it from the realm of possibility for many small sites. Then their is DMOZ, which has become a bastion of power abuse & inefficiency.

There was a time when MSN used Looksmart heavily, Google used DMOZ heavily, and Yahoo used their own directory heavily. Now MSN dropped looksmart awhile ago. Google no longer links to its directory in any highly visible location, it used to be a tab at the top of search results like images & news are now. Then Yahoo used to use directory listings as the main feed for their search, no longer.

Of course there are hundreds of small quality directories out there, like what you’ll find at ISEDB, but major ones seem to be going the way of the dinosaur.

Have search engine algorithms progressed to the point that a quality human reviewed directory is no longer needed? Or has the quality, and perhaps more importantly the freshness, of directories slipped so much that they are no longer needed?

No related posts.

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization »  by: Chris

4 Responses to “Zeal.com Closing Down”

  1. Tim  Says:
    March 22nd, 2006 at 4:26 pm

    Unfortunately, I think it is the latter.

    Most of the categories that I have looked at in DMOZ have either sites that no longer exist, have no editors to add my submissions or have links to rubbish (spam) sites that were most likely only added because the editor of the category owns them and has the ability to add whatever they want.

  2. Chromate  Says:
    March 23rd, 2006 at 5:58 am

    Zeal closing down… What a shame(!) ;)

    DMOZ is still valuable in terms of PR, but it’s packed full of power-trippers.

  3. Dan Grossman  Says:
    March 24th, 2006 at 8:35 pm

    Unfortunately, Yahoo! still uses site descriptions from their directory if a site in search results is found there. The description for one of my sites was written by them about 8 years ago (free submission!) and never changed, but is still the description whenever my site comes up in a search there. It’s a shame because people won’t see what they searched for in the excerpt from the site like most listings have.

  4. Ken Barbalace  Says:
    May 8th, 2006 at 10:01 pm

    I’m very glad to see Zeal go away. I’ve always thought it was a rip off for publishers.

    I find Yahoo’s directory annoying in that it is so expensive to get listings updated, thus like Dan, so of my Yahoo listings have descriptions/titles that are years out of date. The fee isn’t bad when one is focusing their efforts at getting people to one’s main page and the site has a very focused topic. When a site is a heavy content site like mine where each page has a different but very focused topic matter, a single directory listing is all but useless as people would be more interested in seeing subpages than going to the main “home page.” I keep hoping that paid inclusion directories totally disappear and that automated indexing becomes good enough to render human edited directories obsolete. Dmoz is a good example of how human edited directories have failed to deliver on their promise.

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