Correct me if I am wrong but this penalty seems like a SERPs ranking penalty. These directories are holding their PR number. Does this mean that the PR juice they pass along ( and the only reason for their existence ) is still working fine? For example I was getting no traffic from Aviadirectory prior to penalty and none now. But has the PR flow been effected at all?
you need to stop thinkink about pr theres more to life than it these are still quality directories quality backlinks(regardless of pr) + fresh content = Good reults in serps
I agree.. A directory should pass a culmination of benefits to the end user, as well as the site owner... Without getting too specific, this is what you are paying for, along with some admin time to maintain the directory.. That said, look at all the benefits, not just PR... YMMV...
Unless a site is completly de-indexed I don't think the flow of PR is stopped. It could be penalized but I don't think google will ever give out that information. Like others above have stated, go for relevance and quality and don't worry so much about PR.
The PR of a site does not reflect it's ability to pass link juice. You have to consider the business model and business practices in order to evaluate their ability to pass link juice.
John chow is penalised, and people know this. they still buy text links on his blog tho, so i think PR is fine
I think the thing people forget is that Google is not he only SE out there... You get benefit from other SE's as well, in the form of traffic, links, and a quasi type of PR as it were... I think many recognize that the benefit they get from a directory or blog, etc., is a culmination of things from a wide variety of SE's, not just google...
Exactly and its about time people stopped thinking just about google Yes it probably brings in the biggest amount of SE traffic every month but the others bring traffic as well
yeah it probably does but at the moment with the current google issues 90% of my SE traffic comes from other search engines
I am very happy today---bcoz- I now know why directories are vanishing from the SEs. ITS NOT ANY PENALTY- Period. Please read the Sphinn Thread properly- The phenomenon has occured due to "canonicalisation problem" Please spend some-time on that thread- read each and every line of it. Specially Matt Cutts post & the post above by g1smd. After you read those posts- please visit your cpanel and check the latest visitors. Look-out for the Google bots-- and the URLs they are visiting. I have been checking them for few days now since my site got hit. I always find Google bots messing up pages/URLs from site. For example-- the latest page that a Google bot crawled was- http://bestinternetresource.info/Ed...ums_/Government/International_Organizations_/ This makes no sense at all. As most directories love PR and most of them don't want to loose out on a single link passing it- they have (including myself) set 301 redirects. And Matt says Google bot has been having problem to get the proper pages/URLs crawled. No- wonder number of my indexed pages have dropped from 3200_ to just few h8ndreds now Those guys say- it takes between 1 month to 2 months for bots to sort out those problems. Tnx
In hopes that my 'suggestion' gets in front of any Google decision makers... here goes. 'Dear Larry and Sergey', (fat chance) maybe this... Dear Matt, May would humbly suggest that Google move ALL directory websites under a Google section much like is shown for its home page categories; Web - Images - Video - News - Maps - Mail - Directories This way Google can separate out the (directory clutter) from it's general results. I do not own or even manage a directory, but I figure why penalize hundreds of good directories owners that have worked hard and played by the rules? Cheers, Rick
Which penalized directory you know sends a 301 redirect ? Any example ?? Its something DMOZ specific and has been fixed. DMOZ returned a 304 NOT MODIFIED message when i queried Whereas when i open a few penalized directories ( Sorry I wont mention names ), I see 200 OK So whats the point. I dont see any 301 redirect on any of the penalized directories. I check almost 10+ regards aditya
I was using it on mine. I just removed it as soon as I discovered. It not all about 301 redirects. But the new bots having problems with crawling large sites and mixing up with URLs of sub-pages. As I said- only owners of those penalized directories can tell. They can visit their cpanel info of latest visitors and find that Google bots have been mixing up with sub-page URLs. One directory I know of does not use the redirect-- it too got penalized and out of 5000+ index pages, the number came down to 900 something. Now it has been climbing up since last 3 days and its 1500+ now. So there is no penalty at all--just Google bot problem. I would request to fellow directory owners to check the pages Gooble bots have last crawled. If the bots have craled perfectly-- i.e. dmoz.org/Shopping/Home_and_Garden/ ( perfect crawling) dmoz.org/Directories/Arts/Gambling/Shopping/Home_and_Garden/ (messed up--problems--loosing indexed pages)
The other thing that really needs to stop is all the panic and chatter about all these google conspiracies to de-list directories... All you guys are doing is creating hysteria, panic, mayhem and in the end, causing harm to every directory out there... Blaming linking on the current state of directory ranking is going to make less and less people buy links, and in turn less and less people will be listing in directories.. All this crap is hurting everyone's directory indirectly.. It should really stop. In the end, there is one common trait that every de-listed, re-ranked directory shares in common... One and only one... And it is NOT LINKS!!!! Can we please talk about something more productive? These threads are useless!!!
@web24 No I think they'll lose the PR they have. PageRank is updated in large chunks and it used to be done quarterly, but Google is lazy or something and it's happening less frequently - but those sites will most likely lose their PR when the next update comes, sites listed may still receive the PR boost - up until the PR update after that (IMO). So not the next update, but the one after that is probably when they won't get a PR boost from the probably PRless directory sites. Remember that it's not all directories that have been penalized, so play it safe if you must - and go with smaller credible directories. That's just my 2cents of advice.