I have spent the last 2 weeks trying to figure out why some directories have been penalized while others have not. The discussions on DP were not very constructive at getting to the root of the problem. I took the penalized directories and looked at as many factors that I could think of. I have drawn from my personal experience in other industries and come up with a probable cause. I have discussed my directory penalty analysis theory on my site. If I am right then it would be pretty easy to clean up the cross-links. Hopefully the penalties would disappear quickly after that. I would appreciate any constructive comments.
To let you know www.webdirectorylist.com does not use sitesift it uses a custom script same as cdhnow.com and bigweblinks.com
Good try, I think you are definately closer than all the "sky if falling" group that simply say all directories are crashing because of some mystical penatly. I have owned a few of the directories on your list and let me use one of them as an example. submit4backlinks.com - Around 2 months ago I started being a little more aggresive with the term 'web directory' seeing if I could move up in the SERPs, I think I was 67 at the time. Last week I got to 41 and today am at 45 I think...so I have made no real strides but this was only done through some free directories and a few paid featured links. If I was under some sort of imposed penalty I doubt I would have even been able to do that? As far as inter-linking is concerned my directories like 99% of the decent directories out there have links to chris's sites but I just don't see that as a reason for a penalty. Also I am not even sure what kind of penalty it really is, did gooogle manually type in the directory name to be filtered from the results? And if so how did that effect SERPs? So for Submit4Backlinks.com did they discount any links that said submit4backlinks in any way or fashion? If anything that would be counter-productive because it would remove all natural type links before any type of paid ones. Also whatever is happening seems to be effecting many types of blogs and other websites. I know in this section we focus on directories but on other forums and I even noticed it on google websmaster forum today others are noticing the same effect. My conclusion is that google is testing out some ways of discounting certain types of backlinks, maybe site-wides from a certain genre or using certain keywords or a percentage if a certain number of links are built up within x period of time. I think it is a small tweak but it has some wide ranging effect. No doom and gloom from me, because as I said many times before if there was some serious breach of google rules that was being done they would simply de-index sites and that would be the end of it or they would make a public statement with a warning.
Thanks for your comments. Could you post some of the other penalized sites or send them to me. It may help in our analysis.
But Google did warn us that they were going to stop directory owners trading on their account, talking up the value of the tools they provide and exploiting a flawed market. The industry knows this. We know that we have to change the deck of cards we use and the question is whether we are listening or not. Whatever they have done or why, it has exposed and shone a spot light on the inherent defects in this industry. Defects that we all know are there. We should be asking ourselves what we are individually doing to correct the imbalance.
Certainly the effort deserves some credit, guess it will still take some time before we can better understand fully whats going on.
Searchmonster.org seems to stick out from the crowd, I don't think that one has links to a lot of the directories affected.
After studying your theory, it sounds like "Complicated Science" based on different directional ideas. You have put up the possibilities and possibilities only...
I agree with coolweb you have laid out the possibilties in a more complete way but still too many guesses with little facts. I think by the end of October there will be enough data (and probably a toolbar export) to make a better judgement.
Your right. They don't seem to fit the mold. They do have some regular directory listings. Does anyone know the timing of their penalty? Was it at the end of August or before? I did notice that they offer listing in 75 of their directories for 1 fee. That would create quite a duplicate network on their own. Does anyone know what their other sites are?
Hey very good analysis there buddy, that is a nice effory from your side. I think that this penalty will be uplifted soon.
It looks like all of them have been affected, some other ones include: PimpMyLink.com doggyz.com MyTravelAgents.com searchmonster were penalized in round 1, BTW Aaron Wall linked your analysis: seobook.com/what-do-you-call-yourself
Interesting read, kudos for the hard work done. It suggests that most of those penalized seem to be in one 'clique' and maybe using the same tequniques which for whatever reason got up Google's nose?
Interesting. Its only 4 months old. Its PR0. The only thing of not is that it has accumulated a lot of sitewides in a short period of time. Did you notice when it stopped ranking well? Has it ranked well in the past? If you look at the history of directories, there has been many directories penalized / banned over the last 2 years. It is nothing new. Usually it is the directories that are parts of networks but there have been some high profile sites that have been hit. These were removed completely from the index but many of them came back. The hard part is separating the normal penalties to this new one.
I'm glad to see someone finally try to find out what's up rather than just taking about what's up. I hope the stats should help us understand or give us clue a pattern in this Google penalization on those directories. Green added
Anyone have any idea if www.bigweblinks.com is being penalized by google? It no longer shows up in google serps when you search for "bigweblinks".
Neither does... www.alivedirectory.com for "alive directory" www.avivadirectory.com for "aviva directory" ...and probably several others as well!