PR Web Worthless?

I've tried helping a to get traffic and rankings using PR Web a few times over the years, and found that it is mostly a racket. They charge $200+ for you to submit a press release that they say will be circulated to the press, and appear on important news sites, etc. Maybe so, but the value is so low. Let's take a look at an article I submitted in 2012 on PR Web:
Directory Script phpLD now on over 100,000 Websites
So it was released in April of 2010, and now let's look at how valuable it is now. Let's see who picked it up and still has it on their site"

1. The pagerank of the page on PR Web is 0.
2. Some sites like this one took the text, deleted the links in the article and don't even bother linking to phplinkdirectory.com. Wow, big thanks for that (not!) 
3. Then there is the so called Information Engineer that at least kept the links in the article intact. 
4. Then some site called True Predictions at least has a link at the bottom of the article but removed the links inside the article.

And  here is the real kicker! We have received a total of 17 referrals from PR Web since 2010!

Script Listing Sites: Any Value?

I remember quite a while ago, there was a lot of competition for PHP scripts at places like Hotscripts.com but most recently we have not see the same interest. I think increasingly people are finding out about scripts through word of mouth and otherwise, but I still remember the heyday when it was hot. Here is a sample of the listings for phpLD:

1. Scripts.com
2. Resource Index
3. Hot Scripts
4. Best PHP Scripts  

 We still do get traffic from these sources, but tell me, do you use them?

Value of aboutus.org Listings

As I was looking around at domains that have authority according to SeoMoz, one I ran across was aboutus.org. It is similar to wikipedia, but it is more about domains or websites, and there whois info and other facts. I went ahead and created a phpLD About Us page, or I should say edited the existing page. I don't know how valuable it is since this is a site virtually anyone can edit, but hopefully they have a decent editorial policy, because I know google tends to give more value to sites that are well edited, wikipedia being rated 100 by SeoMoz, and this being a similar wiki type site.

Wikipedia Better than DMOZ

I was perusing link directory scripts on DMOZ and noticed the information is out of date. There are quite a few old scripts lists here but not nearly a clear reflection of the current market. It is unfortunate that DMOZ is slowly moving further into the stone age while human edited sites like Wikipedia are still thriving. I remember when I was so happy to finally get a link on DMOZ after a long wait, and now the link is pretty worthless, though sites like SeoMoz give DMOZ a high authority rank still. That said, even SeoMoz ranks wikipedia higher in terms of domain authority.

Heck even an old resource like Resource has a better listing for Link Management than DMOZ. I think DMOZ could do so much better if they could somehow make it worthwhile yet not spammy for editors to actually want to participate.

Directories are a Big Business!

One site that does a great job of tracking the growth and pagerank of directories is web-directories.ws and here is their study published in September 2012. As you can see there are thousands of directories in their database, and in recent years, they have increased their efforts to have a clean list. phpLD has been working to push out some of the people in the business that are using our software illegally with the use of DMCA and this is reflected in September's numbers and I suspect you will see even more of this in their next report!

Directory PR Statistics from September 24th, 2012

phpLD on Wikipedia

Though we have been working on phpLD since 2002 or so, we have never taken the time to put together a history or the script. We've started a phpLD wiki in hopes we can better document the script, the people behind it and the history.

I am still learning how to code with mediawiki but making a little progress. Here is a table I created for example. More to come!

Version	Release Date	Notes
1	2002	Mostly a private project with a few public instances
2[1]	2/5/2005	Original Free Version
3[2]	2/1/2006	Improved Link Management in Admin
3.04[3]	4/23/2006
3.2.0[4]	4/19/2007	Articles
3.3[5]	1/18/2008	Pages
3.4[6]	2/10/2009	TinyMCE
4[7]	9/23/2009	Widgets Introduced, More Languages
4.1[8]	8/31/2010	Link Types, Submit Items
4.2[9]	3/21/2012	Task Manager, Media Manager
4.2.1[10]	5/22/2012	Speed Improvements
4.2.2[11]	7/23/2012	Affiliate URLs
5[12]	11/27/2012	PHP 5.3, Smarty 3, YAML CSS

phpLD 5

So late last year, phpLD version 5 was released and it has made quite a stir! For those that have followed it for a long time, phpLD started just as a link directory script, but now it is much more allowing all of the following content types to be submitted by users and administered by the admin:

1. Link to Website
2. Articles along with comments from users
3. Videos
4. Coupon Codes
5. Pictures
6. Business Listings with Google Maps.

Those are just the built in types, but there are many ways to create new types of content as well.

phpLD 5 also uses PHP version 5, Smarty Version 3 and YAML CSS framework bringing it up to date with current web 2.0 technologies!

If you are interested you will find the phpLD release history on wikipedia.