OK, I guess a pure natural link would be me writing about something and pointing to some valid reference. What I was calling natural was including a URL in a blog comment, forum sig, or other normal places where we can leave a link as part of what we do. I've done nothing like running a spam bot to comment in blogs or guestbooks. Maybe valid link building would be a better term in this case.
Good point. That is indeed natural. There is nothing wrong with any of those methods. You can look at it as a win, win situation. Your a webmaster wanting to leave your site on sigs, blog comments, etc for added exposure. I guess you can call that natural as long as there are no bots involved. Links that are considered shady are sitewides where you pay for a link spot that ends up being cluttered with a bunch of other spammy irrelevant links.
Your sites got penalized not by being listed in these directories, but maybe some other sort of tactic. Google will never penalize a site for being in a directory, maybe just not count the links to it from a directory. The reason again is because this could be used by competitors to destroy someones site. All they have to do is submit your site to directories and your site is screwed.
When did the site drop off its perch? Is there any connection with the directories that have been penalised recently?
As far as i remember, Google do not discredit your site if you're linked from a BAD site. They will simply ignore it because we webmaster have control of where our site are linked from.
You say you have no paid text links, and everything is the same as the other sites? I can see why you'd think it would be the directories since they are the only thing in common for the affected sites, but for the reasons stated above I don't think Google will start penalising your sites for being in certain directories; however if those links are the only ones giving the site ranking and the directories have been penalised for buying text links, that could be the reason. Maybe try getting some more links from paid directories and see if that makes any difference?
I have lots of paid links, primarily from Google Adwords and Yahoo and MSN. I had a few paid links for one of the sites on relevant sites but I dropped those a month ago and only had them about a month. I ran BlogAds 6 months ago which are clearly ads so there should be no negative value assigned. There are other links to the site from posts within well respected blogs (from PR6 to PR8) and other non-directory sites. I have paid to be in a few of the top directories like Yahoo! and MSN and even those provide little value and close to no human traffic. Overtime I see the value of the thousands of directories going down and see other forms of marketing to be more valuable to end users and which the algorithms will value more as time goes on.
Forget for a minute about how you are getting your inbound links, and examine who you are linking out to on those penalised sites. Are you linking out to anyone, and if so are they penalised as well? Are you doing any recips, or any sitewide linking? What I'm trying to get at is, is there any evidence or possibility that your sites have fallen foul of a crosslinking penalty?
Come on, this happens preety often. I have some sites, all more than 2 years old, also listed in DMOZ - and several times already filtered out from serps. Even now has 2 like this. You won't do anything with it. Must be patient and improove what should be improoved. Fresh content helps a lot. Try also to remove Google sitemap, then wait a week or two.
I link out to very few sites, one is a partner that is a top site in our completive field, they're site is PR8, and they are big enough to run Super Bowl ads so I think they are fine SEO and SERP wise. Besides that one partner there have only been a handful of links and I had a word cloud from Swiki.com on it for a long time. Thanks for the thought but I don't think my outbound links were a problem after reviewing.
Nothing new these days. Happened to almost all sites which have solely relied 100% on directory links. They did help in the past, many sites which used directories solely for link building rocked the serps but most of them have been penalized lately. Those sites which took a mixed approach to link building have survived very well. You should have gone for a mixed approach. Right now i guess you must try to acquire "Some Good Links" and focus on "Relevancy (Relevant Sites)" and "Anchor Text Variation" and most importantly deep links. I guess you must forget to get links for homepage for atleast sometime. Add some articles and content pages in your site and get links for those pages. Though i guess it will take you a bit time to come out of this. Why did you post this in directory section ? most of people around are directory owners and they won't believe what you are saying. Most will red you. Get advice from some good SEO guy. If you have SEOMoz premium membership then ask in their Q&A section. You will get excellent advice there. -Aditya
Good advice, I have employed a good bit of that in recent months even before the serp drop. I posted in the Directory section because it was directory related, I later found out a bit more of the occupants. Yes there are some childish ones, one gave me red rep but he is listed as banned now, I have also received three green reps for this and other threads (I usually get one green rep per month). Due to mature posts like yours, I am now persuaded that if done right, directory submission can be helpful and I now have a new strategy that includes further directory submissions.
You need to work out which key word strings are most important to you and to keep topping up every month. This is an ongoing responsibility and after two years I have no problem getting the results I want for what I suppose are uncompetitive key words. Most of the time I use the free directories but I am slowly building up a list of trusted directories that dont expect silly money to review my sites.
Mario, Thanks for the help and the great IM discussions. To all others, I had many discussions with Mario. I paid for his unique directory service work which did not restore my site to its old rank but he continued to work on it (after his paid work was done) and the rankings just came back. If you have a site that you can't get to where it belongs, have Mario see what he can do.
Great mate, am glad u got the rankings back, actually the directories did help too, it just took 2 months which is very normal, google take time to react to your link building efforts. oh and thanks for the kind words! cheers.
It is Very nice to see a bad post turn into a good one. Sometimes we need to be patient. Thanks Brian
To be honest, I don't see Google trying to penalize sites that have many links pointed to them. Assume, you hate Mozilla.com or Microsoft.com, then all you do is submitting them to tens of thousands of linkfarms and they'd be dropped from Google results? Total nonsense! I don't think you're so powerful... I recently spoke to a guy from Dublin's JumpStart (They kind of mix with Google guys), he said I couldn't imagine how fast Google's algorithm changes. Dig deeper. Do you have a links page? Or do you link to some sources through any other articles, newspieces, etc? My guess would be that you yourself have accidently linked to bad neighbourhood.