Thalasar Ventures

This morning I got the official notice, Microsoft is finally shutting down the Microsoft bCentral directory. The directory, long slated for closure, finally has an official shutdown and migration date.

The Microsoft bCentral business directory for a long time has been one of the better tools in building deep links to your site. It offers 6 deep links with the listing which as a highly respected directory had great authority. While many of the categories were often crowded, if you spent time working with the directory, you could definitely find some uncrowded ones and ones relevant to your site.

On May 18th 2007 Microsoft will retire its Submit It! service. The service’s site preparation, directory submittal, and reporting tools will be decommissioned. To help you transition away from the service, we are giving you a limited period of free access to Submit It!’s site preparation, submittal, and reporting tools. In addition, existing Submit It! customers are being offered a way to retain their Small Business Directory listings, for free, through 2008.

Businesses will have until May 11 2007 to update your listings. On May 18, 2007 the Microsoft bCentral business directory will set to a read only directory and business will be unable to make further changes. Microsoft will keep the old directory up until the end of 2008.

In its place, we are offering existing Submit It! customers and others who currently have bCentral Small Business Directory listings a free, grandfathered listing in the new Microsoft Small Business Directory. While we will be preserving the present directory’s link friendliness and search ranking value, slight changes will be made in the way the directory appears to the public and how you may alter your listing

I am interested to see what the new directory will be like. I suspect however, that it will not be the same value as the previous directory but I could be wrong. Microsoft has a site set up with transition information. bCentral Transition. Going to the root url http://www.bcentraltransition.com/ throws an error (ever heard of redirection MS?), so bookmark the first URL and make sure you update your a Microsoft bCentral business directory listing.
Other Directories
You can also submit to this online business directory which has low one time payment fees. Link diversity is as important as link page rank these days. I also recommend Best of the Web! because it’s been online since 1994.