All PHPLD – directory reviews

Romow review

Romow is a paid directory which is almost 4 years old now.

Great design, lovely approach to details, the guys on Askgraphics seemed to have done a great job. Over the years, I have watched as Peter, (the owner), was putting a great deal of marketing and financial efforts into this site.

This directory was affected like many others, including mine, by a Google penalty, that reduced its PR.

What I see different from many other directories is the accent Romow puts on content. For each main category Romow has a related blog. For example, the Entertainment category has a related blog at:

http://www.romow.com/entertainment-blog/

As you can see, the blog latest posts are integrated within the main category, thus providing content, keywords, making the pages to have a better seo quality score. This is a good idea which has a single bad part: the number of articles Romow has to publish to keep the blogs updated. As I see now, some of the blogs were last updated 6 months ago, which in my opinion is too much. Romow tries to overcome this by allowing webmasters to add their own blog posts to this directory, using a section called Submit guest blog page, but I see little success with this approach.

There also is a section which I don’t get: http://www.romow.com/medical-dictionary/ – why would this be placed on a site which targets webmasters and marketing people?

Romow also provides some good webmaster tools (they are working atm) and seems to have lifted its penalization because it is back in SERPs and shows authority stats for is name.

Now about my regular listing (for which I paid a one time fee of $45), which can be found in the General Directories subcategory, I can say that I am satisfied and pleased. On the right bar you can see that this subcategory is integrated with the Internet marketing category of the Internet blog. Pretty cool, huh?

One more thing, Romow hasn’t changed its rates for more then 2 years. Amazing, considering the economical climate and everything!

Another great thing about Romow is that it is not very crowded. This directory is like a small-medium city, where everybody knows a lot of people, or at least has the feeling that has seen most of them before. Almost like my hometown.

PR: 7

Age: 7

Traffic: 7

Category Structure: 8

Listings quality: 9

Number of sites listed: 7

Accepts inner pages: yes

Owner: Peter

Time to get accepted: 2-3 day the most

Good points: Has authority, good Alexa traffic, good listings, good backlink profile and a responsible owner.

Bad points: Rather small PR, the blog structure which needs to be updated more often.

Recommendations: Buy this, it’s rather cheap and a long term investment.