What Happened to Web Directories ?

Ever since it was announced that Google will take actions against those that buy and sell links and pass PageRank juice (withou nofollow tag) webmasters were wondering who is going to win this battle. The first actions was penalization on web directories, the directories received in penalization first on the SERPs and they were not even ranking for their own branding name or domain name, than later on after the last pagerank update of 2007 they were as well penalized on PageRank.

Mainly the penalized directories were those harsh web-farm sites which were honestly useless for humans, linking to any kind of site without making even a small review to who they link and the web directories main goal was to make money online by selling their PageRank. Even their advertisement was something like “PR6 Web Directory – Submit Your Site for Only $10”, they were publicly saying that submitting your site on their directory is the PageRank juice from the backlink. Fair enough.

After that hit on web directories I saw a massive sale of directory sites on Buy & Sell threads of webmaster forums, apparently they suffered economically from the PageRank juice and the revenue / submissions decreased.

What happened with the bigger directories?

Even tho we had no doubts what was the end of the small directories, loosing the battle, what has happened to the big fishes in the directories sea ? I have seen no changes on botw.org directory, but saw that the directory which I was heavily promoting as quality web directory because of their homepage PR and because of the traffic the directory was referring to one of my sites I have listed there has been also penalized on their PageRank score, yes I am talking about the V7N Directory.

I contacted John Scott a month after the drop of their directory homepage PageRank, mainly because I wanted to give him the time to be able to answer to some of my questions. Well even tho John never replied back to me (with neither a yes or no, simply ignored my message) he did replied on a post I made on their forum, where I asked how did the pagerank effected the subscription number in their directory database. These are the exact words of John’s reply in regard of my question.

I don’t see a decline so far. Who knows. I do not run my business based on Google’s paranoia. I run it based on my own convictions.

Words of wisdom, hence I am still considering V7n Directory as a quality web directory and have it listed as one of the seo resources. The fact tho is that, the conversions from my side (as referral) has decreased drastically. But in any case, based on the traffic the site receives from being listed there, I still consider to refer V7N Directory to my readers.

Sharing is caring!