Link Development

This is disappointing. The site ChefMoz.org bit the dust. The epitaph for the site reads: "Thank you for visiting ChefMoz.org. For more than 10 years, ChefMoz was the largest international online directory of restaurants and reviews, covering more than 300,000 restaurants in 142 countries."

A lot of people threw effort into that project hoping to improve local restaurant selection. Now, it is gone, Vanished. Poof!

There is, of course, little money to be made in local link development which consumes substantial time and resources.

I've been worried about the fate of all small and pop web sites. I figured the best bet for helping the community would be to create a link directory for small local web sites. For the last ten years, I've been maintaining link directories for towns in the Mountain West. I currently call the project Community Color.

The sites cost me $150 a month and are time consuming; My goal is to list all the local sites I can find. It usually takes me about 15 minutes to review and add a site. The goal is to list local sites, I have to search through reams of submission requests to determine which ones actually are local.

I was doing it for free. I started asking for profit sites to pay a listing fee of (gasp) $10. I raised the fee to $12 in September in celebration of QE3.

Unfortunately, last month Google declared war on small firms engaged in independent web development. Google and Bing are now penalizing web sites that attempt to engage in link development.

I started this link development project well before Google became the ringmaster of the Internet. Personally, I think the main problem with the internet is that there is not enough people actively engaged in link development.

It makes me sick that Google is now directly engaged in trying to destroy the last remaining small independent sites.

Anyway, i am currently working on a tool to streamline the removal of links from the Community Color sites. I hope to have it up in the next few days.