The reason Directory Journal and some other directories can still survive is because they do editorial reviews of sites they list in their directory, and as far as I've been able to tell, they really do a pretty good job of those. If you check out a category like Business Software, you'll see a couple of listings, and when you click one, like the one for Fuel Quest, you'll see that along with the homepage link you get up to 3 deep links you can submit. Now Fuel Quest doesn't rank top notch with those links yet, but they do rank second page on some nice terms when they've only got 2-3 links, one of them being from Directory Journal.

I've investigated some more sites, and it seems that these links do help. After seeing that I dove into why that is true, after all, to be able to give away link equity, a site must have some of it first. If you check out the Majestic SEO report for the site, you'll see they've got an awful lot of nice pages with pretty good backlinks, acquired through multiple methods. They've got some free WordPress themes to download, not one but a couple of very decent blogs with some real quality, unique content and some nice tools for webmasters as well. In all: they've earned their links, and have quite a few of them, which explains why a link from the domain would help in your rankings.

So I think I can honestly say that I think investing the $159.95 for a permanent listing along with 3 deep links is worth it if you need a couple of extra links, and that Directory Journal belongs in the small list of directories that you can still use and feel good about.

DirJournal: a directory still worth submitting to is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I liked the tool back then, and provided some feedback to Dan. Today Dan e-mailed me that Crawl Score was now released in version 1, and immediately ordered a sponsored review from me to show it to you, my readers. I of course happily said yes to that, and started looking at the tool again.

What does it do?
Well, it crawls your site, and creates pretty reports from the data it gathers while doing that. When I started doing this review, I made it crawl this site again, to see what it came up with and be able to make screenshots for you people.

First off, this is the menu that it gives you, which immediately shows you that is has a very slick interface (made it a bit smaller to fit):

The report that is now highlighted, the 200 report, shows all "normally" accessible pages within your site, and looks like this:

You can then click on a page title to get a summary for that page, which looks like this:

As you can see there's a small bug there, it's mixing up the keywords and the description, but the information is very complete and useful.

Another nice feature is the reporting of duplicate titles and descriptions, for instance this duplicate title report for my blog:

This is only a small sample of the reports it gives, and I think this can be a very useful tool. It has some bugs, and it will probably improve a lot over the coming months. You should probably check the features page if this interests you.

Pricing
If you use this service to take care of a few websites, the basic subscription will be good enough, and will only set you back $99.99 for 3 months, which translates into like €67 at the moment.

So, is it worth it?
If you consider how easy this service makes some stuff, I think it's well worth it! You might say "Google Webmaster Tools can give me this info too". First of all: not all of it, and secondly: have you found the crawl now button in Google Webmaster Tools yet? No? You won't. There is none. You can use this tool when you want it, and get the data at the time you need. Of course this tool isn't finished yet, but I seriously think this could be a good addition to the webmasters' toolbox.

If you want your product or service to be reviewed like this as well, see the sponsored reviews section of my advertising page!

Finding crawl issues with Crawl Score is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I got a request to do a sponsored review for Bidvertiser for Advertisers. Requests like this are always fun, and this one started off even better, since the people at Bidvertiser really get how this market works. They encouraged me to sign up for their referral program and use the code in there to link to them, because that would give new advertisers a nice $20 in free clicks. Apparently they do not mind at all that I will get paid for that as well, which shows that they really like to be reviewed!

I must say I'm pretty impressed with their interface, it looks nice, reports well and fast and does pretty much everything you'd want it to do. Searching for cars gave me a load of sites on which you can advertise, and quite a few subcategories to do even more targeted niche advertising.

After I had selected a few for my car advertisement, I got the option to set up geotargetting. I chose US only for this testrun, but having the option to target your ads as easy as this is pretty nice. After that I got the possibility to set my bid prices, and what I found really good to see is that they're not inflating expected clicks. If they expect you to get 12 clicks a month from a site and tell that honestly, I'm impressed.

I think that using Bidvertiser you can get some pretty nice exposure if you pick your sites right (there is some crap in there, just skip through that), for a pretty low amount of money. Now what more would you want? So go sign up already!

Bidvertiser.net - Text-Link-Advertising is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I was asked to review Text Link Ads (aff) on ReviewMe. I've been using Text-Link-Ads as a publisher for quite a while now, so I have quite a few things to say about it, both positive and negative.

Interface wise, TLA rocks. It has a very intuitive interface, and I've been able to find my way around quite easily most of the time. There are some issues though: when you're editing your listings, it's not obvious which listings are really listed, unless you know what the difference is. As it turns out, if your site is listed, it will give a screenshot of your site when editing your listings, and a text: "your site is currently available at: link". It won't give you any info like this when your site is not listed though, which caused me to find out a few of my sites weren't listed a few weeks to late...

Their support is great; I've had a couple of issues were things weren't showing up the way they were supposed to, and every time I've contacted support about such an issue, they got back to me within 1 or 2 days and had fixed the problem.

Payments are also arranged nicely, you get paid after links have been up for a month or part of a month, and the payment is usually in within 3 days after the end of the month. During the month you can see a nice overview of what you've earned so far, and every time they've sold a link on one of your websites they will e-mail you. (That has become one of my favourite e-mails :) )

Installing the ad code is pretty easy when you have a supported blog platform, the WordPress plugin worked perfectly for me. It would be good though if you could change the color etc of your links in a page in your WordPress admin instead of their interface. I use the PHP code on some sites as well, and that has worked perfectly as well, though it's a bit harder to implement.

Their feedvertising stuff is cool as well, but I haven't given that a proper try either yet. What I did see in my quick try of it was that it's easy to use, as are all their products. It allows you to show personal ads under your RSS feeds, which might be very useful for cross promoting your sites.
I've honestly never made money off of their affiliate program yet, but I haven't been trying hard either, I might give that a try some more in the coming months. I can say that getting links and banners etc. for that is quite easy.

Review of Text-Link-Ads.com is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I got an email today from Text-Link-Ads, saying that my site had been pre-approved for ReviewMe. I thought: now that's the way to go, that is an awesome marketing action. They probably just automatically pre-approved all Text-Link-Ad approved sites, and sent out an email, easy to do, and that's one hell of a quickstart for ReviewMe, very clever.

So I went and signed up, that was actually quite easy, it allows for payment through PayPal, and I immediatly got the chance to do a review of ReviewMe, to get me started and earn the first cash.

So let's talk about the looks: it looks great, very web 2.0 and very clean. I haven't had to think once about where I would find stuff, which shows that they've really thought it out well.

The signup was smooth as well, I simply added my blog's URL and feed URL, categorized it, tagged it and gave a small description. Thanks to the pre-approval, that was it, and I could go about my business of accepting the first review.

Accepting that first review was easy as well, I could just click on it, see the guidelines, accept it, and then it said: you have 48 hours to complete your review. What you do next is write your review, feed the URL for your review back in to the system, and you're done.

The content guidelines contained a very nice rule: "You must disclose that the post is a paid post in some way. Here are some ideas: "Sponsored Post:", "The following is a paid review:" "Advertisement:". I really digg that, no cheeky paid blogging: just be honest about it.

All in all, I'd have to give a big thumbs up to Patrick Gavin and his team for getting this done. I love it.

ReviewMe is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Online shopping is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

After that they went the extra mile and made a list of the best directories to submit your site to, based on Seomoz's page strength tool. It's a very cool list, with directories and their submission prizes. Among those are quite a few free ones if you're willing to wait a while. I'd say: go check it out: "What are the Strongest Directories?"

The strongest online directories is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Apogee Search is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!