Was doing my homework on the subject and found out that not only my directory was guilty of this... but just about all the others too. The problem I found was that non-existing directories were getting crawled, indexed, and used for backlinks to those websites that are now screaming to have all their links removed from our directories. My directory should only be producing links two levels deep... but I was finding URLs that were randomly adding the different categories and producing URLs like 6 to 8 levels deep. These URLs do not exist and never did. They should of never been crawled and indexed to begin with. They are returning an HTTP 200 code instead of a 404 like other websites do. And the possibilities for these URLs is infinite. You don't even need existing categories... just make anything up such as /foo/bar and you get the home page instead of a 404. This leaves us with tens of thousands (maybe many more) of different URLs all pointing to the same web page. I figured these URLs could very well be viewed as a keyword stuffed linking scheme by Google and possibly the reason behind all those unnatural link warnings they sent. They can also be the easiest thing for other site owners to pick out of their backlink profiles as an unnatural link and why we all get those link removal emails. So anyone know how to fix this problem properly? I tried various rewrite codes in the htaccess file... but nothing works that covers all the possibilities. If you want to read my long report on this matter... its posted at www.scoopy.us
Sounds to me like a very old version of phpLD with a buggy template to boot. You should upgrade your directory.
That was like my first thought... but I checked other phpLD scripts... including versions 4.1 and they do the same thing. I even checked a current directorypress site and it does the same thing.
I already search your forum (while logged in)... and the answers must be hidden from me because I didn't find any info regarding this issue there.