I have about 20 sites. Two recently went out of favor with Google. I was racking my brain to see why one went from great long tail SERPs to nothing. It still has good PR and has all pages listed in Google but it doesn't show up in top five listings like it did earlier this year. The other site is totally ignored by Google, no pages showing, no PR, no backlinks even though I have a sitemap.xml that is showing up as fine in Google Webmaster tools. I recalled that I had a guy submit the first site to a bunch of directories a year ago. I dug through my emails and found that I also had him submit the second site. These were the only two sites I did directory submissions on and these are the only two sites to fall into disfavor with Google. Is there any way to confirm that this is why Google is frowning on these to sites? Are reconsideration requests working?
how you came up to this conclusion??? i believe you are definitely wrong! try to find the real reason!
First, free directories are always accepting tons of websites, which main that ur site has gone into page 3 or 4 with another 50 bad quality unrelated links in those spammy "free" directories. those links wont really help your rankings, at least not like quality paid directories, add to that the fact that u probably didnt keep building links for those websites, what kind of result do you expect ? am not surprised at all to see your rankings dropping. that being said am curious, so if you want pm me your URL i'll take a look at your websites and see if you are doing anything wrong. cheers. mario
I've had many sites submitted to directories and they are still doing fine.. In fact my sites are ranking better than ever recently. I will note that I've never gone the paid directory route. Only free directories. I've also (almost) never paid for links.
Don't jump to the conclusion that I am wrong. I have looked into it and reviewed it with a friend who is a speaker at most major search engine conferences.
Well, I have many sites that are doing well. We most likely are not in the same directories and things may change for you over time. BTW, the first site is listed in Yahoo's paid directory and in DMOZ.
I don't think Google will make the mistake of penalizing sites for the links pointing to them. At least not if they are an established site that otherwise has good links. As soon as it becomes clear Google is penalizing sites for certain types of links pointing at them - All anyone will have to do is submit their competitors urls to those sites. Discounting links is one thing, penalizing sites is another. I suppose these two things could look similar... but they aren't really. Ol' Cutts said himself that Google won't penalize sites for the links that are pointed at them. It'd just be too easy to manipulate if they did that.
I did continue with link building but they are coming from forum posts, social network bookmarks, blogs, all of which were natural. I'll pm with URLs.
but you can easily see the the other site!If that is true just think...everyone who wish to eliminate his competition will be very pleased to pay a few dollars to someone to submit his competitor site to directorys.!! So if this is true you hit a jackpot mate.Just run this kind of service and you will get x.xxx.xxx of $ in a year. so dont tell me that your friend who is speaking in conferences about SEs didnt tell you that!
I'm not sure that "link builidng" equates to "natural" given that you're taking an active part. Doesn't seem natural when it's initiated by the site owner/webmaster. Are you sure that your other "link building" methods are not partly responsible?
hahhahah your conclusions are stupid and so is your friend, if any reasons for your removal it's cuz your in dmoz
CReed - I think there's very few successful websites that have all purely natural link building (all links coming from the goodness of others who just happen to enjoy that site and wish to link to it.)
Seeing similar results for 1 of my urls. Also, I just noticed that www.bigweblinks.com no longer shows up when you search for "bigweblinks" in google.
Zibblu - I don't doubt that in the least. But for the OP to conclude that the directory listings are the cause and continue on with how he's link building "naturally" makes me think there could very well be other reasons that these sites have fallen from favor.
I see differently. I have a few sites listed in dmoz and for reasons discussed here, they have not lost their rankings.
Maybe so but it still shows up when you search for bigweblinks.com and so do when searching for alivedirectory.com and avivadirectory.com. My guess is that they'll be back.
Yes. It's insane to think that Google would penalize a site because it's in DMOZ. DMOZ links to many of the top websites on the internet. People just come up with absolutely crazy hypothesis sometimes. I think Google makes people a bit neurotic... and understandably because they bring most of us such a large portion of our traffic. But I think it's important to remain sensible and logical.
If you want to be taken seriously then post the URL's so we can have a look at the sites, otherwise it is just a piece of fiction.