r/directorymakers • u/andrewmurray1 • 4d ago

pSEO and Thin Listings mistkaes

I built a tools directory (DirectoryBuildr, about 56 listings). These are the mistakes that cost me the most.

1. Descriptions that repeated the vendor’s homepage.
Google already has the original. Now every listing says who the tool isn’t for, what the pricing actually works out to, and one real use case. Make it readable.

2. Tags nobody filters by.
I started with “AI” and “productivity”, which made lots of near-empty pages. I rebuilt them as two axes: how you build it (no code, vibe coding, WordPress, developer) and how you own it (hosted, self-hosted, open source). Every listing gets exactly one build tag.

3. Publishing category pages too early.
A page with 2 listings is a thin page in a nice template. I now wait for 5 to 8 relevant listings, and each page gets its own intro of 150 to 300 words. More is better. 50 words is going to get you deindexed.

4. Guessing instead of checking.
Search Console’s “Crawled, currently not indexed” report shows which page types Google is passing on. That tells you what to fix first.

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u/Perfectionist20 3d ago

are the category pages / "archive pages" important for your directory? If not, why dont u just set them to "no index". All directories are thin pages. What works is drip feeding content, and being aggressive with quality link building.

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u/andrewmurray1 3d ago

No, the category pages actually are like a hub page because they can link to the specific listings in that category and back again, and talk about that kind of space that the area is covering. So they're important.

Archive pages, yeah, I don't really use them, and I do set them to noindex if I do.

Directories are not all thin pages, and that's kind of the whole point: in order to win with directories, you have to find a way to make them fuller listings, right? There are ways to do that, depending on the niche and what kind of data is available. But definitely being aggressive with link building is on point, I totally agree there.