Matt Cutt's comments on directories, can somebody plz clarify

you're correct, a site cannot control who links to them, only who they link to.

 

Free or Paid, I think the point was, does the "directory" (again, free or paid or both) "REJECT" submissions? Ultimate point being, directories that accept any and all submissions are not necessarily as high quality as say a directory that rejects spammy submissions.

All good points in the article, but something I think Matt misses is whether or not a directory does more than act as a "linking" system... Some directories actually do send traffic to sites. A directory is more than just an affiliate linking system. It should be a place where highly organized sites and categories are available to end users looking to find information and webmasters looking to drive traffic to their sights.

The right mix of both are key in any good directory.

 

Very good point in deed. I must say Your baby (King Bloom) sends more traffic to my sites than any other web directory.

 

These are key:

Q: I’m worried that someone will buy links to my site and then report that.

A: We’ve always tried very hard to prevent site A from hurting site B. That’s why these reports aren’t being fed directly into algorithms, and are being used as the starting point rather than being used directly. You might also want to review the policy mentioned in my 2005 post (individual links can be discounted and sellers can lose their ability to pass on PageRank/anchortext/etc., which doesn’t allow site A to hurt site B).


Q: Google’s quality guidelines say “Make sites for users, not search engines.” Put that in context for me; how does that interact with buying links?

A: If someone is buying text links to try to rank higher on search engines, they’re already doing something intended more for search engines than for users. If you finish that guideline, you’ll see that it’s talking about doing radically different things for engines versus users (for example, cloaking or creating doorway pages). It would be a misinterpretation of that guideline to think “Okay, I can only do things for users, I can never do things for search engines. Therefore I can buy text links, but not in a way that doesn’t affect search engines.” That same philosophy would mean that you wouldn’t create a robots.txt file (users don’t check those), never make any meta tags (users don’t see meta tags), never create an XML sitemap file (users wouldn’t know about them), and wouldn’t create web pages that validate (users wouldn’t notice). Yet these are all great practices to do. So if you want to buy links, I’d buy them for users/traffic, not for PageRank/search engines.

 

He often reads this forum. Last activity is in April.

Take a look at his public profile.

 

I think getting links from directories can help and shouldn't hurt. Of course quality directories can provide a good backlink.

 

So this is the sort of thing that could happen to a directory it seems, so it means that you could be wasting money buying links on directories that are engaging in the sort of practices mentioned by Matt.

 

I don't want to meddle in high pr or low pr. I just want to know "What is the future of Directoires, FREE & PAID".

 

Well if you plan on being a QBC (as an0n explained) then the future looks bleak.

If your going to start a directory and link with quality sites then your future looks bright

Its your choice how you operate your directory or directories...

But linking will have a new twist to it and whom you are giving the link to will also play a roll in your evaluation when the PR is updated by google.

thx
malcolm

 

Directories will be always there

Directories should have quality and should also provide visitors to the websites listed in it!

only those directories will stay in the market forever

We did not see a directory except Dmoz(few others) which was before Google

All the other from v7n,....etc were all started after Google

So we should see how directories perform in the future?

I think if there is no Google most of the directories would become defunct only Few directories would be there

And niche directories at the time would have high value!

 

Well i agree that directories will not die as long a s google counts links as vote then they will remain...

The quality factor will paly a large roll in the...
"whom do i want to be listed in group"
as google will seperate the good from the bad in the manner
of issuing PR.... so i belive

thx
malcolm

 

if you are talking about directories do not talk about Google then you will be able to separate best and good directories

 

but i felt he kinda CONTRADICTS himself....

first, he says G frowns upon buying links that INFLUENCES pagerank.
Then he says that quality directories are acceptable (which mostly translates to paid backlinks).

These two arguments do not gel.....

 

Actually not at all. Doesn't translate to paid backlinks. But categorizes the listing in the correct category.

Suppose you are a Web Design Company and you submit to Dmoz or a high quality directory in the Web Design Category.

Your listing is surrounded by other 'Web Design' listings, so by context, it is obvious that your site is related to web design.

Now if u submit to a low quality directory, your listing might not have that much weight.

Plus also, people tend to browse high quality directories for resources cause there listed in order.


So this should clear up the misconception about that. A few high quality directory listings will help your site much more than 1000 low quality directory listings.


If you don't believe me, try and submit your site to 1000 directories, then try a high quality one and the difference should be obvious.



thx

 

isn't your example a clear case of paid submission to influence backlinks then (which Matt says is frowned upon)?

 

Well this is what Matt Cutts said

Not all paid links are a potential violation of Google's TOS.

Now the way you advertise your Links Factory in ur sig, could be since ur using Google's Page Rank as the selling point and I think it violates there TOS.



Now here's the part he said about directories

You can read the entire post if ur interested, the link is in the beginning of this thread.

I'm still having trouble understanding what this is supposed to mean.

 

Another thing that MC fails to touch on with regard to good directories, is the rejection of dead sites.

It is one thing to have initially approved a good site and moved it to a proper category. But what happens when the site turns "GoDaddy" landing page because it disappeared?

I think it is equally important to make sure that sites, while at one time approved, are constantly monitored and removed if they go dormant, unreachable, or turn into some landing page for a registrar.

As I edit KingBloom today, I see 137 dead URL's, I just removed 13 - re-activated sites that were in a queue with 30 or so re-activated sites. These are sites that went dead, then came back... Our system automatically removes them from our directory when they go dead. If they remain dead, they eventually disappear completely. If they come back to life, I check them manually to see if they came back as they were, or turned into some crappy GoDaddy landing pages, or some other type of half assed landing page.

If they are, I nuke them. If not, I re-activate them. I would say at KingBloom we do about 20 or so deletions per day, and about 5-10 re-activations... I'm sure we are far from perfect, but anything we can do to keep the directory fresh, IMO should be seen by Google in the in out nature of, and number of indexed pages our directory has on a daily basis.

Google should concentrate more on dead URL's, instead of low content or spammy URL's, in my estimation... It is astounding at times the number of dead links that show up in the top 10 search results for a given search term on some days.

 

One of the things we might be able to read between the lines on these latest announcements is more emphasis on theming. Google say they are getting better at sniffing out paid links, and then they go on to point out websites with a bunch of off-topic links that they have found and determined to be selling links.

So here's a piece of complete speculation: what if part of the algorithm to determine whether or not a link is paid is concerned with the percentage of unthemed links on a page or website? It would be a simple matter of examining the anchor text and the text of the landing page, and figuring out how much that correlates with the text of the linking page. Add in a bunch of words that Google knows to be closely associated with the link text, and away you go.

If Google were doing such a thing, and as I say this is only speculation, this could benefit directory owners who keep their categories tightly themed, whereas directories selling sitewides unrelated to most of their pages might find these links are discounted.

 

You could very well be correct since theirs tools out their like keyword search terms that give you the
top ten closest or related terms for that word....
It would be simple enough to not add the link on home page and only the rest of the site...
i mean the only way then would be human intervention to go threw and find sites and how many pages...

If you are correct about the words on the catagory pages then it would be easy to add words to make
them relevant such as adding extra text or something to make it somehow blend... maybe anyway...

But i don't see that happening (them coming to every site )... whatever google does thier will always be
attempts to get around the system to beat the system... it human nature to try i suppose..

But definetly a very good explanation and one i will test to see on one of my new directories

thx
malcolm