Latest Attack on Directories

Nice to see I am not the only one being hit by this misinformation. It's become completely ridiculous lately.

 

Hi David
I am using phpld in many of directory sites and one sanboxed site of mine was a good ranked (PR6) and a good earner. Now I need to learn your new scripts for the link removal etc will it work for my site and will prepare my directory for a reconsideration by big G.
regards

 

I'm not sure if I understood you correctly, but if you want to remove bad links like those that point to malware or parked domains, you want the invalid links checker.

 

Is there no value for web directory any more

 

The value is still there, on a real directory. The downturn in directory traffic and submissions is the aftermath of when Google does an algorithm update and then SEO commentators get involved.

Several SEO commentators have been hounding the directory industry and blaming it for creating people's unnatural backlinking profiles. This has lead to many SEOs taking that misinformation and flipping it in their favour to prune/remove the links they once purchased for their clients.

These SEOs do this for a fee.

The hilarious thing about all this is that when they come to remove these links from the directories, the directory owners turn around and demand a fee to them for removing the link. Then the SEOs cry foul because their profit margin suddenly disappears and they can't screw their clients out of easy money. Then their mouthpiece Big Barry chimes in with his 2c of shrapnel, claiming that directory owners are extorting money to remove links... Oh dear. The hypocrisy!

Barry is one of the worst SEO commentators - His thread is propaganda, and the way he speaks it's like directory owners are being extortionate.

If that's what he is *really* finding, then perhaps he shouldn't have begun his ridiculous witch hunt in the first place (He was the one saying Google was de-indexing directories, before he qualified it, and qualified it, to the point that what he was saying was something completely different. i.e. that Google wasn't de-indexing directories specifically, because, well... no one bothered to do any research... Woopsy Barry, probably should do that next time ).

The thing about "catchy headlines" is that if they don't *really* relate to the story, and no one *really* reads the story past the catchy headline, then it creates panic and misinformation.

The fact is, most reasonable people disagree with Barry in his thread. Because his comments, and thoughts, are unreasonable.

Poor Barry... you reap what you sow!

 

The original email you received sounds almost as low as the Nigerian scammers..
There have got be people out there falling for their pitch and signing up for their services (whether useful/whitehat/honest or not).

 

I love it. Now the SEO community is saying directory owners are evil for charging to remove links. The irony is that if you read through the comments on the post that Dan linked to, a great many of the SEO'ers recognize that the removals take time and effort and perhaps charging a fee isn't as outrageous as it sounds.

Google sure has created a big fat mess with this. They need to wake up and realize that the SEO'ers that they seem so enamored with are the ones truly gaming their system.

I'd love to know how many of their customers, who paid for directory submissions, are now being charged for removing those links. Those guys have to be laughing all the way to the bank. Every time they post some garbage, it makes them more money at the expense of others.

Here's a thought. If an SEO professional submitted their client's site(s) to a directory which has actually been listed as a bad link in Webmaster Tools, shouldn't they have to eat whatever expense is involved in the removal of that link? After all, by submitting to a poorly maintained directory, the SEO firm has damaged their client. Perhaps their customers should consider suing them?

 

Ironic yes... The SEO community created this mess.

 

Well, unfortunately, they cannot really do that because we don't live in an ideal world, and the situation isn't black and white.

There are some unscrupulous people benefitting from the propaganda, by intentionally creating bad network neighbourhoods, mass-linking to people's websites without their knowledge, and then sending them extortionate emails. I've seen it happen.

Negative SEO is alive and well, and is set to get far far worse. Forget the mediocre directories that exist on the web. People are intentionally creating splogs and spam directories in their thousands, mass-linking to peoples websites and killing their businesses, because Google turned the links can harm your website switch on.

This is the new world order. You now have no control over your linking profile and anyone can damage your business and kill it off in Google, and extort money from you in order for you to regain that business. The thing is, once you've paid your $FEE, what if they just decide to do it again? You know, cos you paid em once, why wouldn't you pay them twice. Google has created a new mafia!

 

Dan, I was being a bit facetious in my comment about suing the SEO pros. They mentioned suing directory owners yet it was they who submitted their clients to the cookie cutter directories in the first place.

I suspect this whole extortion and sites built for the sole purpose of negative SEO is going to have to expand for a while. Eventually, Google is going to have to drop this backlinks can hurt idea in favor of common sense. It sounds like the sort of thing where the SEO pros got drunk with a bunch of Googlers and convinced the Googlers is was a good idea to punish people who don't use their services.

 

What I find even more ironic is that Google still choose to and SEO services still CHOOSE to advertise in my directory.

There's a do as I say, not as I do attitude lately in the realm of SEO and SE

 

Not good. If people are doing that using our script, let me know, as this could "potentially" be grounds for license revocation, or at the very least an internal flag where such people don't get any help from us on issues of support, etc.

 

Well it's not necessarily confined to one script or one site type. In recent times I've been sent .CSV's from people's Google WMT accounts asking me to help them identify why they are penalised.

They've been misinformed by SEOs that it is because of directories. What I've found is completely different. It's not just spammy directories, in fact they are the smaller end of the spectrum. The big culprit is blogs. To be more specific, it's very bad blogs. It's blogs, who have no moderation and auto-approve links, and their link is displayed in a mass-spam list of links along with many others, and it's not 100 links in their .CSV that is ruining their profile, it's 1000s. Literally 1000s. Pages and pages of links they never sought out, never asked for, never built, that have been built against their profile.

So it is difficult to say "this directory script" is being utilised in a negative manner, when the vast number of poor links are coming from non-directory sites.

Part of the problem is intentional negative SEO. The other part of the problem, is people intentionally seeking out dofollow blogs and making dumb comments on them in order to get a link back, and doing it enmasse. What's terrible about that, is that they've been lead to believe this is a natural process by SEOs who keep lauding this idea that blogs and guest blogging are fantastic.

Sure blogging is a very strong content building process, but only when it is done for humans. The second it is utilised as an SEO tactic it's done poorly (a quantity versus quality basis) and when a backlinking profile is saturated by blog links, particular lower level (easy to get) ones, it skews that profile negatively (the same as if a backlinking profile consisted solely of just 1000s of low level directory listings).

 

how stupid Google is to create such negative SEO chaos.

 

I was working on several projects back in 2011 and Panda slammed us. Then Penguin...
None of them were directories, but high quality content sites with lots of genuine visitors.

Traffic dropped -75 %.

I think directories won't have a bright future unless they change their entire business model. The typical directory model is exactly what Penguin and Panda dislike...

 

They continue to make money off the advertisers either way. So in that regard I'm not sure it's really a negative from their perspective.

 

With a directory, it is really simple. Have an editorial policy and list good sites, and it will help those sites rank on google. You don't need SEO Moz or special tools.

 

The latest I am seeing now is people who have listed in our directory are now threatening to tattle on Google about any directories that are "charging" to remove links. Whether or not this is really coming from Google or not has yet to be verified. But I have received a few emails that not only indicate that Google is responsible for getting sites delisted, but that they have a blacklist of sorts for directories that charge for services.

Its really hard to disseminate the bad info from the good info lately.

In each case I have asked those asking to be delisted to show me the email or any other correspondence they received from google that supports their claims. So far NO ONE has taken me up on it.

The only response I did get sited the following linke: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736

And that says NOTHING about directories either specifically or suggestively.

At this point I would say I have about a 60% conversion rate on those asking for delistings that are actually paying for it. That said, we can justify the time involved.

 

Google have actually said they would do something, but they weren't specific about "just directories".

source: http://searchengineland.com/google-explains-new-link-warnings-says-dont-panic-but-dont-ignore-128888

If it's a case-by-case basis, then they probably only act on a site getting 100s or 1000s of spam reports. This is the real concern with the way Google communicate. They tend to word things poorly, and in such a brief and vague manner. Heck they even refer to "charging to put links up". Google charges companies to put links up on their advertising pages, so technically based on what they've said above they are guilty of their own misdemeanour. But it is obviously not supposed to be read like that.

You can take that quote and basically interpret it any way you like. If you are an SEO running around like a chicken with its head cut off, proclaiming that the sky is falling in, then you would probably take that quote to mean that Google is going to torch any directory that won't remove links to people's sites. Heck, you could even say that you were doing the web a favour and asked the directory to remove all your competitors links too, and they refused to do that also, so they should be buried!

Any reasonable and normal person though will take the quote to mean what it means. That the directory networks and blog networks and whatever-else-networks that exist who are conducting intentional negative SEO OR who by their similar structure exist in a way that is spammy (all interlinked, all allowing the same dupe-anchors and dupe-content) are going to get targeted. BUT those same directory networks and blog networks would've been targeted anyways because they are spammers plain and simple.

Good directory owners need not panic. If Google is going to "wage war" on them to the extent that the daft SEOs are proclaiming, there will be nothing left of the web but rubble and rabble.