Hot on the heels of a certain bidding directory comes another ReviewMe, this time for a blog directory where you pay a flat rate and get listed for life.

It’s Good to Be Alive!

The Alive blog directory is pretty much what you would expect it to be. It’s a long listing of all sorts of different kinds of blogs, spanning several different categories. There are no fancy graphics to pull your attention away from the links. Instead, you get a remarkably simple and clean interface where the links take center stage. That’s the plus side.

On the down side, my initial impression of the Alive Blog Directory is that it looks almost like a parked domain page. You know the kind: when you accidentally put some typo in the address bar and arrive at a page that is filled with paid links, encouraging you to click on one of the advertisements so that the webmaster can make a quick buck. Those sites are just thrown together and remain relatively static, even if they claim that it’s still “under construction.”

This is where my first suggestion comes in. Granted, a web directory is typically not the prettiest thing in the world, nor is it the most complex offering on the ‘net, but you’ve got to do a little something to make the site look like more than just a link farm. Just a basic homepage with a little information about the Alive blog directory could go a long way in showing a little credibility.

I kind of like the Yoga-esque logo, though. That’s pretty attractive.

Categories Galore

If you’ve got a blog, there’s a good chance that the Alive directory has a category that’ll suit you. From pets and animals to politics and government, every blog should have its place.

For those of you looking to market your website (that isn’t a blog), Alive also has a standard web directory with just as many categories, like science, shopping, and society. In fact, I found the layout on the web directory to be more pleasing than the blog directory, simply because of the inclusion of a “today’s listing spotlight” and what almost appears like a navigation panel (but is really just a list of other directories).

How Much Does It Cost?

Ah, there’s the rub. There’s no bidding involved and you have the option between purchasing a lifetime link — assuming the Alive directory stays live — or a link on an annual basis. There is also a difference in pricing between being a “featured link”, which gets placed at the top of the listings, and a regular listing, which is shown underneath the featured links, organized by PageRank. The pricing is as follows.

For a Featured Listing, you can pay $74.95 a year or $59.95 a year. The former gets you five additional links, presumably on your listing page. If you want to take the plunge and go permanent, the same offerings can be had for $224.95 and $179.95, respectively.

Regular listings are $49.95, $34.95, and $29.95 annually for regular (plus 3 additional links), regular, and regular with reciprocal, respectively. For the reciprocal link, as you can probably guess, you have to give the Alive blog directory a linkback on your own site. Permanent pricing is $149.95 and $104.95; there is no reciprocal option for the permanent link.

Pricing for the main web directory is slightly higher. A permanent featured link with 5 additional links on the web directory, for example, is $299.95 (compared to $224.95 for the blog directory).

I Think I Found a Glitch?

Um, why are there no links in this directory? On the main blog directory homepage, I can see that there are supposed to be 13 links within Arts and Culture. Clicking through, I find a series of sub-categories, but all of them have a big juicy 0 (zero) next to them. Where are these 13 links hiding? The same phenomenon occurs with most of the other categories. One of the first “live” links that I found was within the general directories sub-category. Someone needs to go clean up the coding or something, because this clearly cannot be right.

Is it worth paying this much simply for a linkback? What has been your experience with web directories and blog directories? I’ve personally submitted my blog to a couple of free directories and the return has been minimal at best. With the Alive Blog Directory, I don’t foresee the results to be that much different.