The market stays stable and will continually to do so as MORE QUALITY Directories gets Authority Ranks. Just my opinion.
Google is not going to act against QUALITY DIRECTORIES--infact it is loving quality directories which is proved by the fact that it has elevated some QUALITY PAID directories to authority status recently. On the other-hand it has downgraded some free directories from Authority to NORMAL. So it means --google is emphasizing more on quality --
If PR is a big thing for your business, which it is for most except the sites that already have recognition (brand name and/or popularity) then working with google and not against it is important for visibility. Google understands the importance of backlinks for sites building traffic but might be weighing it a little less once you get up there with the big ranks. Don't remove them just build on them with content. I guess it's the natural progression of it, like getting your foot in the door then letting your content take you further. because besides once you get the top ranking what else but content probably will keep you up there. But if google goes the way of brand name and/or popularity heavily outweighing the rest than content becomes a tremdous factor.
quality is got to the primary factor in all this. anyone can get links, but quality links are better. but that goes for anything as well, better quality will always outperform the rest.
That right, moreover it much better to have a quality directories site that doing it job. (get us a backlink).
directories won't go away because it's important for visibility for sites. The more avenues for a site to be displayed the better. It might have gotten to a point where the next step, quality of directories is the focus. So the more quality avenues for a site to be displayed the better. That is where discussions about link spam comes into play just as much. It might even be beneficial for the quality rating aspect of this.
Directories will evaluate and will look like ordinary sites , instead of pages with links they will be more article directoryish.But I think we have time for that , google won't ruin the market and if they make any changes we'll change , too and we 'll be swifter than ordinary people
the concept of directory is kind of different as those sites that sell irrelevant links. so don't worry to much.
I thought of something interesting, what happens if 'G' just devalues the worth of links from directories, say they filter them by 20% or xx%, will folks even notice that. Even at 50% of their value directory links are still a great investment. Also if anyone thinks that 'G' is going to look at each and every single directory and evaluate it's quality I think that is just a 'pipe dream'. That would be way too 'humam' resource intensive. If they do anything it will probably be to the whole industry and I doubt it will be of a destructive nature, just devaluation.
I believe Google is trying to make barrier to entry harder for newbies and this will most likely discourage new players to the ground and will only encourage oldbies to be inside. In otherwords, it doesn't sound like democrat to me.. Gooogle should be more open and encourage people to learn and open door for newbies.
itll only (with any luck) discourage people creating directories of links amounting to duplicated content directories with unique content and quality listings will always be around
Sounds more of a Republican than a Democrat. Learning is always an OPEN DOOR Process but remember even in SCHOOL you have to PAY even for books and supplies.
i think google will not do this soon but if this happend and google banned all directories this will be very bad news for directory owners... Hope for the best
Heard anything about chain reaction ? If Google bans directories then next is blogs after blogs would be articles and after articles would be business websites and so on so forth so whats left is NONE and I am going to the Beach to relax while Bill Gates would be in the NEWS all over again.
In fact, it's already been started. One of my site (game related) has already been out of the first page of SERP for the terms i'm working on (meaning buying inbound links, lots of them but span in more than 1 year to acquire lots of them). and now my hardwork and obviously $$$$ (high 4 digits)'s gone to drain and I see that my traffic drops by 3 folds. That's what happen when you believe so much in Google!