Analysis of Google's Directory Penalty

Hey so were we finally able to draw a conclusion from the analysis.?

I just wish I had time to read all those posts.

I kinda skimmed em.

 

I looked at these for a while but decided that they were probably penalized for completely different reasons than the rest. I put them on a separate page of penalized directories. If anyone has any compelling reasons I'll gladly put them back in the main list.


Thanks for the note in your blog

 

I see a listings for epitrome.com and I don't ever recall that url to be a directory, there's no record of it being registered or archived pages.

I think you might be thinking of epitrope.com?

 

Oops I thought I had already corrected that error. It is epitrope.com. Thanks.

 

I found 5 free directories and added them to the list. Some of these hardly show any reasons for being penalized manually. believe that this is significant.

I was concentrating on the high PR paid directories so I hadn't been looking at free directories. If anyone has any other free ones please pass them along to me.

 

Insightful analysis - I guess it comes down to what Google & Co. are striving for: relevance.
That is, for any given search term, is a particular directory really the most relevant result out there? For many now penalized sites, I think that the honest answer would likely be no. How did Google & Co. identify these site as 'less relevant': while no one on the outside knows the exact algorithm, I would tend to agree with CanadianEh's analysis. In particular: uniform content and link text across multiple directories, uniform back link text and a rapid occurrence of new backlinks would be some of the factors that I would suspect as raising some Google flags...

Just my Can$.02 - now actually worth almost US$.02 - Go Canada!

 

I've seen sites penalized like this before(they were not showing in top for their own domain/title) and they kept pagerank and also kept a lot of traffic of the inner pages.

 

refund for what? for changes in google algo?
but sitewides could be a cause, becasue few years ago sitewide links were giving a huge boost in PR/SERPS, then they start being abused by webmasters so google had to change something

 

Some people just may have had genuine intentions when buying sitewide links so if Google do take offence against them shouldn't people who sold them give a refund? Its not aimed at people who bought them for the sake of PR chasing, serves their right.

 

Were there any stipulations that allowed for a refund? It may be that they were bought and sold for all the wrong reasons, but I think that the buyer and seller knew that it was out of their control and both parties were willing to share that risk. No guarantees. No refunds.

 

Not going to disagree, it isn't about anything other than did anyone have the thought to refund perhaps even out of feeling bad for selling links they now plan to remove.

 

I still believe our directories have not been penalized. It is a very very major algo shift. Or may be some errors in our coding.

Matt has categorically stated time and again that no sites --no sites will be penalized for selling/buying links.
Can't we think of other possibilities?

The scenario with DMOZ was the same-- not ranking first for DMOZ --But due to the special status it enjoys -- Matt Cutts personally participated in restoring it which is evident from the discussion over Sphinn.

On that discussion I also learnt that- it can take upto two months for the bots to properly crawl sites they have been having difficulty.

So we still have over a month to get a final verdict on this- Penalization Or Algo Tweaks.

As all of us are aware Google is going against paid links-- lots of possibilities spring-up. Another point I must note here is that- the much awaited PR update is still not forth-cming. So Major/revolutionary algo change holds more truth.
And YES- I have faith in what Matt Cutts said- NO SITE WILL BE PENALIZED.

 

Where did you get that quote from? Matt recently did a presentation on Paid Links @ SES, in which he said
"Do paid links that pass PageRank violate search engines’ quality guidelines?
The answer to that question is yes."

 

Are you talking about SES San Jose Conference? Yes I read about the conference on Matt's blog/SEOMOZ's Round-up post and few more round-ups by eminet SEOs. Yes they violate the quality guidelines --but they will not be penalized. They will just be stripped of the power to pass PR.

The above is not a quote-
But his statement in the discussion on his Report Paid Links post. Please find it here-- www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/

Also -if you don't want to go through those hundreds of posts (comments) on the discussion - I Googled it for you--

Matt's blog post comes first again- and please read the cached text.

 

If it were my intent to remove a paid ad, by all means I would consider issuing them a refund, probably the full amount as opposed to a prorated refund as it was I who did not fufill the obligation by removing the ad before it expired

 

Good work overall.

I think there could also be third round of penalty is something worst has been decided by Google otherwise we could see few penalized directories coming out of penalty in near future if penalty was only to tackle particular issue like 'unique contents' or 'paid links'.

 

It's quite a ways from over.

 

I believe we still have to wait one more month if it is algo problem. If its about penalty - 2 more months - like BMW and Ricoh once had.

 

The fact you've given consideration to some level of refund is good enough for me and credit to you for that. Main complaint I have is that people who blatantly sold indefinate sitewides are more than likely to keep the money regardless. But hey, again its just my gods honest opinion.

 

And I beleive the moon is made of cheese, oops, does that mean I get another anonymous red rep for alledly bumping a fresh thread. Glad I'm egoless and color blind.