A lot of them were already anyway. Interesting happenings, one to keep a close eye on. I guess they were fed up with the millions of iterations of PR passing going on via directories. The link value just never ends up anywhere since it's passed on continuously by these hubs. Delete those from the equation and things go back to normal...
It is a good thing to discourage the directory mania from going on. We have so many and unless you have something unique ... just say NO. Don't copy, re-copy and then copy the copy of someone's copy. If it makes no sense to human beings, the search engines will get rid of it. And I don't need the Google toolbar to tell me that something is wrong here.
That's exactly what I've been saying! I don't even submit to the crap ones, even if they have a marginal benefit still now that will soon be erased.
No because they will keep a decent amount of traffic attracting to them. (Traffic vs Link Pop.) The other 10 billion will become more useless indeed.
Me neither, I figgure they are a waste of my time unless I can see some kind of power behind it from a skilled owner or an idea that may carry thru long term speaking.
What bothers me the most about the directories is this: what if visitors actually go there and search. And find ... what? 4 adsense links and a clickable logo back to the home page? I have seen some pretty good directories in the DMOZ category but that is only 50% of all "directories" listed. The others will disappoint - no web surfer should be frustrated to that extent. If you cannot please the public, search engines need to disregard you, that is their job.
Agree with you ST, but why this one?http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Searching/Directories/ Is this to suggest that the Google directory itself is not helpful to the searcher?
Right, they have realized that their own feed coming from DMOZ contains unuseful resources and they decided to disregard it for the sake of pleasing the web surfer. Good move
They most likely have a lot of directories that are considered bad neighborhoods in the topic. Google lowered the ax on a large number of them. They are easy to find; they will have cached topics but the main page will not be cached and with some that were most likely manually removed none of the pages are cached.
So let me see if I understand this correctly (and please excuse me if I am unaware of how this works). Google pro-actively turned a whole set of web directories to rank lowest in their rankings. This might possibly be because of the upsurge in directories that I am seeing advertised on this forum (which is probably the tip of the iceberg). Which directories are left that are not PR 0?
No major directory is PR 0 and the ones I'm associated with have seen no drop in search engine traffic.