As I have telegraphed before, I'm going to eliminate that little farrier directory thing that is on Horseshoes.com (the one alphabetized by the farriers' first names:confused:). I have put the current Horseshoes.com listings on Farriers.com, so I'm giving those folks a year's $48.50 listing on a site with much better farrier search results (like number one for almost every farrier search, at least in the states) in exchange. I have not turned the horseshoe one off yet in case the uproar over the loss nears riot levels. But if everyone (let's settle for most) feels good about the trade then I'm going to turn it off and just put a big linking page from Horseshoes to Farriers.com which is going to be attached at the hip with this site from now on. I've already eliminated the payment option to get the little directory listing but added an option to buy a Farriers.com ad.

And speaking of Farriers.com, a few days ago I finished the initial clean-up of the United States listings, removing almost 2/3rds of the ads (a lot of old, obsolete ads with bad contact info). More will come off if the remaining unpaid for listings are not brought current. Why? So the farriers that are paying for the ad will get the traffic and horse owners will be able to contact farriers that still are farriers. It's not fair for current Farrier.com customers to pay and the others to ride along for years for free, oh yeah, and I need to pay for the site, details.

I believe Farriers.com is now the only non-organization owned farrier listing that is maintained to eliminate old listings. It provides a lot of bang for the buck, I can't imagine a better use of your advertising dollars. If you are not on there now or I have notified you that you are about to be removed then please consider investing in a year long ad, the traffic per ad will be a multiple of what it was just a month ago. I think you will be glad you did.

The classifieds will eventually go the same way as the directory, if you want to put free classified ads on HorseandBarn.com just ask me for a coupon code by email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. I've put a bunch of Farrier related categories on there but if you think of some I need to add let me know.

Just my thoughts on the classifieds. Every forum I have visited in the pas has a classified sub forum or thread. For people wanting to sell items to the community in the forum. I'm willing to bet that 98% of the people that want to sell their clipping hammer would quickly throw up a post to offer it to the community that's poking around the forum already, but they would not fill out a form on a classified add section (that no one really visits anyway) to try to sell their item there. I've purchased a lot of items through classified item threads on a bunch of forums. I always wished horseshoes.com would allow that sort of market. Most all these forums prohibit commercial sales btw, strictly users selling their stuff to other users.