Web Directory Penalization
Google search engine | September 7th, 2007 | 10 CommentsIt was announced, we were warned, the penalties took action on some sites, but that was not enough to convince us, or simply it was a not a smart move for many webmasters since it was going to kill their online business.
We see our websites dance in the SERPs of Google search engine and we keep wondering if its our SEO techniques in question or what? No, seems like there is a Google Algorithm update on going and hence this dancing through the SERPs of our website for the targeted keywords.
My guess is that the new algo is constantly being rolled out for testing, then rolled back and tweaked. And that the new algo is majoring on identifying paid links.
The next on the penalization list of Google search engine seems to be the Web Directories which lately (since a day or two) have blatantly dropped in SERPs of Google even for their branding name.
Questions asked to the most friendly (my opinion) Google Engineer, Matt Cutts in regard to the penalization of web directories and the Matts answers.
Mike asks:
Firstly, why have many web directories fallen out of the first few pages of google for their own name? “aviva directory” “alive directory”. These are established sites and have lost rankings all over the place. My site is included in this, that why i am asking.
Matt Cutts answers:
Here’s what I’ve said about directories recently:
“Q: Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?
A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
– Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
– What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of
the directory.
– If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.
_
Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.”
I have to agree with Matt Cutts on this, sometimes i feel like there are more web directories instead of blogs. But we still do have quality web directories to which we can get listings if we want to get some exposure on the web.
Do you agree too with Matt Cutts?
I definitely agree. And I would like to see more of these spammy directories disappear of the face of Google. Because they are getting ranked higher than decent sites. And because they don’t provide any value.
I personally have not paid for links before. And I believe that Google would be able to provide better search results if they penalised all paid links. And also, if they didn’t penalise sites for a lot of outbound links.
Sites would link more naturally if they didn’t think that linking out was going to dilute their PR.
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