Web Directory Reviews

Detailed Review For Aviva Web Directory

We were unable to get in touch with Jeff,  owner of Aviva Web Directory,  hence will be discussing about aviva  itself  and talk about the possible  decline in its Serp  rankings, especially on Google, as pointed out  by a  friend of mine, hence no  interview will be posted.

Aviva has  a great design and we have noticed few other directories  are trying to copy the styles of Aviva,  matter of fact is, being a coder for phpld directory templates, I have been approached by not  1 but  2  directory owners to  make their template look like Aviva itself. This shows that its design has impressed many. Great design means its quite user friendly.

Aviva has lots of resources for directory owners, like the blog where users can find lots of free templates for various directory scripts. Blog also covers directory industry related news, tips for directory owners, strongest directory list and many more articles.

Overall Aviva Directory looks like a true winner, but is it truly a winner?
To answer the above question lets first look at Aviva’s about us page, according to web archive its still under development for about 6 months now. Now talk about having fresh content on pages.  The page has not been even developed. Is Jeff that busy or just does not know what to write about his own directory. If I see a page like that personally I walk turn away from that site, because there is no point in spending bucks on a site having the most important “about us” page still under construction for over 6 months. Anyways I have attached screenshots below showing the Google cache itself showing that no effort has been made to finish the page.
Please check http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://avivadirectory.com/about.php  for history of the page.

Aviva cache as on August 5th,2007

Aviva Directory About Us Page as of August 30,2007.

Now, the hot topic “how is aviva doing for rankings on the Killer Search Engine:  Google”. As pointed out by friend of mine, who noticed quite interesting things on Google! 
Type in  terms like “aviva internet resource”,  “Aviva Download Blog”, “Aviva Shopping Directory”, “Aviva Web Directory Resource”, “Aviva Strongest Directories” or for the  term (as extracted from their description  meta tag) “Selective human-edited directory”
Do, you notice that there is no sign of Aviva’s site anywhere in those results? So, what happened there?  Is Aviva been dropped by Google or is it just because of fluctuations in Google results because of the ongoing pagerank update?
These are few of the questions that I have on my mind,  but since I  have limited knowledge regarding  SEO  and Google algorithms,  I would refrain from answering these questions but maybe you can help me out by posting possible reasons  why we are seeing such results.  I read on few places like webmaster forums that google is doing a data dump and de-indexing sites. Maybe that is why aviva is no where to be seen on google for specific terms.

Few important questions on my mind right now that I would like to ask Jeff are: 
Is Jeff concerned about the recent changes in Aviva’s ranking on Google for specific terms?
When will the "about us page" get finished, it’s been 6 months or more already? And more importantly why has Jeff neglected the development of that page?
When will someone reply to our question we submitted to Aviva about 2 months back using their contact form?  (That’s correct I used their contact form few months back when web directory reviews project was launched and have not heard anything back yet).

Shocking news that Aviva has been stealing content off other directories like http://www.only-yours.com/ now how true is it ? Here is link to screenshots posted by Dave owner of above directory : http://www.only-yours.com/aviva/aviva.htm . Sad to know that Jeff could actually be involved. I hope Jeff comes out in public now to either apologize to the masses or to proove that he is innocent and infact Dave forged the results and is trying to make Aviva look bad. This review will be edited when Jeff makes a statement about this whole scandal aviva is involved with.