Directories to avoid / sites that Google recently banned..

Not a problem with SOME of those directories and SOME of those owners. But people are learning and its their right. We might burn in hell for our OWN mistakes but surely we won't jump in hell because THE BOSS is telling us to jump. And that my friend is really pathetic.

 

I hope everything's alright here, but I had a site that has been on the web for over 6 years. It become very popular in Google where it was ranking #1 - #5 for good keywords and phrases. It had been like this for a few years. My sites content was increasing all the time. It came to a point where I started getting just over 60,000 uniques from Google a month. I then paid just over $2,000 so that I could have a few poeple write game descriptions for a part of my site as they were not unique and was decriptions that others were using. I did this for my visitors and also to keep Google happy. Just before the people were about to finish the descriptions which was over 500 of them, my site lost all rankings, even though them descriptions where going up daily before the site had it's rankings lowered. It was nothing to do with the old descriptions as they were only a sentence or 2 of text. It was probably another part of the site that they didn't like. But something like that happening really can affect you and make you think in your future decisions. In other words, if you are purchasing unique and original content for your site so that you can keep your visitors and google happy, then I would mainly do it for your visitors as you never know what may happen these days with Google. If you are just doing it so that you can try and get good rankings in google then there is always a chance that you could spend thousands on Google and get a penalty still.

Unfortunately I am sorry to say that this penalty is still on this site. If it is a penalty or not I'm not 100% sure, but if it is a penalty, then it has been on the site for nearly 2 years now and I can't seem to get rid of it.

The penalty involves the site not ranking for its name, it ranks #1 for domainname.com, but if you just type domainname then it will not rank #1, but will rank down at the 31 - 60th listing for the sites name without the extension. It has been like this for nearly 2 years and has never gone above 31 for any part of the site. Hardly none of the start is in supplemental results either. It still gets traffic, but the traffic has gone from a whopping 60,000+ per month to a trickle of around 250 - 400 uniques per month and has been that way ever since.

I have taken a look at bigweblinks and text-link-ads and it seems that it is either a coincidence or they have what my site has got as I have typed in bigweblinks to Google and it ranks around 45 - 60th listing down the page, the same as text-link-ads. I didn't take a look at the others, but anyway I have a feeling it is some sort of penalty and if it isn't then it's a coincidence, but a very good one.

Personally if these sites were selling text links then that is really selling advertising. They were making money from advertising other sites and that is what the internet was first set up for as far as I know, plus a way to communicate, play games, etc. But advertising for a large factor and thats what them sites were just doing and are still doing as far as I know.

If Google has given them a penalty and will continue giving sites like that a penalty and other good sites aswell then Google should start worrying more about duplicate content as no one is going to want to spend hundreds or even thousands on unique and original content when they don't even know what their chances are or how long they may have good rankings in Google.

Google doesn't want people to sell links or purchase links. But when you think about it, the people that are more likely to buy links are the ones that really want to make a success of their site/business/company and are more likely to want to offer good and useful services. The sites that are likely to do the opposite or set up sites that are not so good are the ones that don't want to spend money on their sites or purchase links and will therefore try to just get free links pointing to their site or take part in link exchanges. So realistically, google is making it harder for the good sites that have the money to rank higher in their search engines.

This is just what I think and have written this quickly, so don't know if it makes sense or not.

 

heheheh i think you wrote more here and shared more info then anyone yet to make
a post in this thread that has unfortunitly manged to find its way around the web.

Thanks for sharing this info...

thx
malcolm

 

John269, that was a great post and full of useful information from different perspectives too. Green sent.

Thx
Rob

 

Thanks for the green reps. Didn't expect them and appreciate them.

 

I am not really sure what it might have to do with what is going on now but it is an interesting read. What is the URL btw? Is it a directory?

 

if i'm right, nothing comes free in life.

burning in hell is something very serious.

 

It was more of a portal which did include a small web directory (didn't even have any empty categories), but the web directory was free to submit to and didn't have any spam in it as I use to manually approve each listing which took a few hours a day of my time.

I prefer not to give the url of the portal, sorry.

 

Don't be shy.
www affiliateseeking com

Sometimes it sucks when you see the flow of Niagara Falls sway in so many directions.

 

Try typing in affiliateseeking or affiliate directories into Google and you will see affiliateseeking ranks well so that site does not have a penalty and it should never get one with what it offers, but who knows with Google. I've spent a good few thousand on building up affiliateseeking and it's content. Most of its content is unique and original, there may just be a few affiliate program listings that are the same as a few other directories, but we do tend to re-write as many as we can that get submitted to us.

So that site gets ruled out.

The site was simplysearch4it com. It's alexa ranking went below 30,000 at one point to nearly 20,000. The site had a web directory, articles directory, product price comparison, games, videos, pictures, and more. It was about 4 weeks ago that I totally took everything of the site and moved the articles directory of it's sub domain and put it on the top level domain. I will now be keeping it like that most probably for years to come (so it's now an articles directory). It's still getting traffic and still has an alexa ranking of under 300,000.

If the penalty gets lifted now because it's change then that would be great, but if it doesn't then it doesn't worry me as I prefer to work on my other niches. I'm just working on things now that I know I will be able to still easily manage and survive without any google traffic.

With having a web directory and articles directory and price comparison which that site had, they are quite hard niches to survive in once you lose Googles traffic and PR, which really was practically the whole site apart from the games, videos and pictures and these only counted for about 1,000 of the pages on the site whereas the others counted for over 100,000 pages.

I know do things much differently since that site got it's penalty, that's if it's a penalty, but I couldn't seem to get it ranking back where it use to be for it's own name even.

 

That is strange and the fact that it happened two years ago and continues till today is weird. Could it have something to do with having the number '4' in it, some loophole in the algorythm? I guess I am reaching with that but I find it weird.

If gooogle puts a penalty on a specific site do they ever notify you of it?

 

Why would Google ban these directories and not the Yahoo directory? Why would they ban one at all, anyway? Paid links? Then the Yahoo directory should be banned as well I guess.

I Googled as well and noticed that I can't find these sites in the results, but that could just be a glitch... a glitch that just happens to remove these top few directories from the listings. But I'm quite sure they'll be back soon, it's happened before

 

I agree to this point, why is yahoo not punishing paid links & how do u manage to promote a web directory only by natural links is a main question I would like to ask Matt ?

 

If you are refering to Eli B they said why is yahoo not penalized because they sell 'reviews', not why is yahoo not penalizing.

Matt Cutts has stated that gooogle has no problem with paid advertising as long as it is 'no follow' or the equivalent.

 

No, if you get a penalty or even a ban, they do not seem to notify you about it. They don't even tell you how to solve it. So in other words you could spend over a year sorting your site out, reading their webmaster guidelines time and time again, looking at every bit of code to make sure it's correct, use the html validator, pay others to look at your site, etc. and still not get back in.

It would be strange if it's the number 4 as a lot of domains has numbers in them including number '4'.

 

hahaha, ya it would be strange, I didn't really just mean the number '4' I meant using a number in the directory name to represent a word. I know it is strange but I notice one of my older directories 2listnow.com does not rank for 2 list now or 2list now and same for my directory submit4backlinks.com, but 2 search deep does rank for it's name.....so I guess that probably isn't it.

 

This point gets rolled out all the time. The simple fact is that Yahoo has probably never bought a link to swell the rank of its own directory - so is not a realistic comparison IMO. It is a site with massive trust and authority

 

Good point, I see the SERP position my highly promoted site was at now taken by a site with a similar domain name which looks like it's been set up and forgotten about.

 

yea..i guess a site that gets "set it and forget it" shall rank higher than a site that someone actually cares about?..besides all the bickering that goes on..if i submit to directory sites,sponsor templates and so forth,its because i care about my site and i want ppl to know about it..not for some lame ass green bar..i want traffic and for ppl to know i care about my sites..

 

Alive doesn't gotten banned. It's still indexed by google. Maybe only devalued or something else.