I was looking for blog directories in which to enter our travel blog and found these two:

1. http://www.bloglog.com
2. http://www.blogtopsites.com

After filling in account and blog details, I got a message that I should copy-paste HTML code to my blog before they will show my blog in the directory. I had landed on a clever link swapping scheme. After digging deeper, I discovered that the links they wanted to have were not rel="nofollow", but the links they provided were actually 302 Redirects that block page rank and Blogtopsites even has a rel="nofollow" in their links.



The principle is simple: to farm as many links as possible and sell advertising without giving any link juice back to bloggers. It would have been more honest if they had placed rel="nofollow" tags to their links as well. For the record, here are the HTML codes they required to be inserted to the blog in exchange for showing the blog on their listing:

1. www.bloglog.com 2. www.blogtopsites.com Both sites are almost identical including design, structure, advertisements and functionality. They probably have the same owner who is testing the limits of search engine spam by making minor modifications to one of the sites and then comparing the results with the other.

In any case, if you list your blog on these services you risk receiving search engine penalties for participating in a link exchange scheme. And don't bother opting out from receiving any email from them as they will keep spamming you anyway.

Can you recommend me an honest blog directory that is not trying to spam search engines?

It's now 1 week since my trial and those spammers have still not followed my request and removed my account. Looks like they are dead. The same happened with 2 other services I tried: http://www.blogflux.com and https://www.blogarama.com/. Both are still "pending for approval" and offer speedy approval for those who pay them. All of these blog directories appear to be mere scams.

Would you be interested in participating if I program a free and open blog directory that is not just search engine spam?

I found one more blog directory that claims to be the oldest: blogarama.com



Registering our travel blog to their directory worked. They claim that adding a "reciprocal" link would sufficiently speed up the approval process and will provide higher placement in their blog ranking and they would promote my posts on their main page.



However, their understanding of "reciprocal" is somewhat different than mine:

• I should place the following dofollow link on my blog:

  Code: Select all

  <a href="http://www.blogarama.com/travel-blogs/1294688-blog/" title="Blogarama.com - Follow me on Blogarama">Follow me on Blogarama</a>

• In exchange they would give me a nofollow link unless I pay them US $4,90/month

Does this sound "reciprocal" to you? To me this looks like yet another link selling scheme to spam search engines.



This kind of explains their current low page rank, although it probably should be 0.