After submitting site to directories, dropped out

I hand submitted myself to about 40 directories over the course of a week. Pretty standard stuff I have been doing for years.

Until recently I have never had a problem, but after submitting a few sites the past few weeks I have seen good soid results in Yahoo only to then see my sites all get blacklisted.

Being I always hand write all my content, mind my use of H1's, have 0 redirects, or anything else that would be considered "shady", I am completely stumped.

I am assuming it is due to one or several of these directories now being considered "bad neighborhoods" by Yahoo. They aren't FFA or anything like that, but they must be considered SPAM directories.

I realize that 99% of the time you won't be penalized for incoming links, but you can easily be penalized for linking to bad sites. So that is my first guess, I am linking to a bad "SPAM" site.

My second guess is that since Yahoo has no policy to review SPAM listings other then just deleting them right away, I think some jerk might be reporting all my sites one by one to the Yahoo SPAM submission page.

Any way you cut it, its been a freakish experience watching all my hard work go down the toilet on Yahoo.

To answer some obvious questions peope might have: All sites have their own dedicated IP, no sharing. All sites have many pages of hand written content with non stolen. I rarely if ever go over 2-3% keyword densities on my pages. And lastly I had many pages indexed and top 10 rankings all around, to 1 or 0 pages indexed and no rankings at all all within a 2 week period.

 

Yahoo has been sporadic for quite some time for me. To give an example, I have a number of sites with some very good rankings. Every now and then, I'll drop 9,889 or so spots to nothing. Just vanish. Then a few days later, just reappear. This happened again just yesterday. I had a number six for a keyword for my index. And I have a number 2 for it's keyword on an inner page. The index dropped to nothing, the inner stayed. I have other sites where this "mystery" happens from time to time.

I have no explanation as to why it happens, but it can be heart stopping to see it. Hopefully yours will reappear in a few days.

 

i dont think its wise to only rely on free directories for backlinks

 

Do you have any experience with bad results from this?

 

Is it possible to be penalized if you only have directories linking to you?

 

Generally speaking the answer would be NO. But to be future proof we all try to get links from other sites as well. We cannot depend fully on directories anyway. If google ( or anyother SE) decides to penalize links from directories, you will be the one who gets affected first.

directories can be helpful these days, but that wont be good in long term.