Discussing about DirBull.com

Valid Fake PR?

It's still not real... That is the point. Feel sorry for the saps that pay this buy 50 bucks a link.

 

They have been getting away with it since early 2010, so many people have benefited from it. See https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/is-this-a-real-pr-8-directory.1762582/#post-13980915 It is real until G does something about it.

 

I know, he's one of many dirtballs out there that ruin the industry for the rest of us.
Anyway, I don't know what the benefit of passing short lived unstable and fake PR is.

 

Quick bucks. There should be a club.

 

The only benefit here seems to be with the Directory Owner; scamming people out of money.

 

lol. people start calling you Mickey. (no offence, Joke)
yea. i have see many high PR website, but after update they PR crashing down.

 

The point was the PR is not real. It's short lived and obtained fraudulently.

 

DirBull has been pr7 for a couple years now so the pr is real imo. It checks out as valid on page rank checkers and look at the high page rank on subdomains.

How they got that pr is another issue. Them getting the page rank from hidden links on sites that may or may not know they are even there does not mean that the page rank on dirbull is not real. Just means they used blackhat methods to get it.

I doubt that the owner of Dirbull cares too much about Google catching on to that site because they have a whole slew of high page rank directories with rankings obtained in the same manner as dirbull. If they lose one they have 5 or 6 more ready to take its place. For google to make it hurt they would need to zero out that owners entire network of directories.

 

Have you heard the idiom that goes "beating a dead horse?" I say the same idiom can be slightly modified to apply here too. Discussing dirbull.com's PR techniques is like beating a dead bull.

 

So here we sit arguing semantics. What people should be doing is making other's aware of his "network" of sites and the fraud being perpetrated.

 

I would have to disagree. DirBull.com is just one of many directories that is gaming the system. Hidden links, 301s to fake pagerank, directories built on dropped domains, directories built to harvest email addresses, etc. If we spent all our time making other people aware of these issues, there would be no time left to work on our own sites. Google will eventually sort this out anyway.

As directory owners, I would hope the discussion would place less of an emphasis on pagerank and more importance placed on features. Basically these discussions among directory owners helps to fuel the belief that pagerank is the single most important variable that determines the value of a directory. This is not true.

 

I would have agreed to a point until someone here started messaging me, and I've changed my mind as a result. Unfortunately Google is NOT finding out, and NOT doing anything. It perplexes me to no end that the legitimate directories are continually under attack by Google and SEO's yet the crap directories that are pulling these PR shifting tactics are continually overlooked.

If we don't start policing this ourselves, our industry will continue on a downwards spiral.

Agree completely. The purpose of a Directory is not the boost PR; period!

 

Mia, I'm not sure how someone messaging you influenced your opinion. That sounds interesting in itself.

It's not just legitimate directories that are under attack, but many different types of websites. I don't think Google is the one doing the attacking though. I think it's merely a case of competitors getting away with gaming the system that irritates some - including you possibly and me for sure.

The same techniques used by some directory owners to game the system are being used in all niches. I believe DirBull.com is using at least some SAPE network links. Other sites are doing the same thing in the industry I'm in. Google is good at identifying common forms of "link spam," but the SAPE network is much harder for Google to detect because there are limited footprints. Webmasters that submit their sites to directories know most of the tricks and will avoid those directories. But consumers in my niche don't know anything at all and are buying product from the sites listed at the top of Google without knowing how they gamed their way to the position.

I understand your frustration, but I would not waste too much effort with it. If you feel compelled to make others aware of dirbull.com, take it to Google. An example backlink of dirbull.com is on the bottom of this page. The link is from a 1x1 image that is clear and hidden to viewers. The page happens to be PR 6.

Google is not the only one giving dirbull.com plenty of love. Look at:

http://www.whenweseo.com/web_directories/high_pagerank_directories.jsp
http://www.greatdirectories.org/offer.html
http://www.dir-list.com/
http://www.directorycritic.com/paid-directory-list.html?sort=pr&pg=
http://www.paiddirectorylist.com/pr6/

If a war is what you want, there's some ammunition for you above.

 

good job Google! dirbull gained PR8!

 

And the site is now ranking normally in Google. LOL.

 

No

Not looking for a war. Just want others to be aware of what is going on and that the PR is not valid and fleeting.

 

As was brought out on the v7n forums, it seems the whole dircut.com network is based on hacked typo3 sites. There is a big thread over there where people are reporting them to google and notifying the hacked sites. For example, right now legion.org (the American Legion) is hacked. I highly doubt American war veterans will be happy that their site was hacked by a directory business in Pakistan. I really don't like this stuff because their are honest people who work hard to edit their directories and have for years. This takes away from honest people who didn't do any illegal hacking, and it is just not cool. I'm pretty sure this will be coming to an end quite soon. Time will tell.

Surely, the dircut people had to anticipate they would be found out one day. I really had no idea until recently how big this thing is. Surely it involves millions of dollars. I knew about medranks in 2010 and assumed it was a fluke, and thought nothing more. This is HUGE and either it is solved or these people pretty much own our industry.

I might feel a little different if they were actually doing amazing directory editing and making a directory that competes with the quality of Yahoo or DMOZ, but they are not. I might feel different if they were making a contribution to the industry in some other way, but they haven't. They have a major PR problem as in "public_relations" now and it is sure to get worse.

 

The most logical solution here is for someone to go re-hack the sites and pull all the links. There's never any repercussion for hacking these sites, and of those notified, they rarely if ever respond,much less know how to fix the bug. My guess is the language barrier is at issue in many cases.

Amazes me to no end that Google is unable to spot these. They seemed to have absolutely no trouble manually shit canning reputable directories several years ago.

 

Don't the folks at typo3 ever update their software? Seems like that would be a good place to start. Eliminate the exploit and start to eliminate the problem. Still leaves the existing links but at least it keeps any news sites from being hacked.

 

You can update something all you want, if the site owner does not implement the fix it does not matter!