Guys, did any of you had any penalties for your small directories (not big and known ones) I had my bizfive.com directory making good money while it was PR5, but then the pagerank dropped to PR2 and the revenue almost dried out. So, I think my site was under some penalty, I've added nofollow tags to my own banners there and and files a reconsideration request, but the situation is still the same. I thought that maybe I just lost some big backlinks as well and built more links, now waiting for the next update to see how it goes. I'd be interested to see your thoughts on this subject, did you have any penalties? How much do you depend on pagerank? Other thoughts or ideas? Thanks.
Google call it adjustment and not penalties AMRAY Web Directory went from 6 to 4 but it doesn't bothers us because we're getting only 8% of traffic from SE and the rest from backlinks about 35,000 of them fastreplies
When you are a pay for review directory, unfortunately PR matters. PR 5 to PR 2 can definitely be called adjustments.
The whole thing was like a line of dominoes. Directory X bought their way to huge PR so a bunch of other directories paid big to get links on Directory X. That second group of directories started getting nice PR so a third tier of directories paid a little less to get listed on the second group's sites. A third group of directories...and so on. From what I saw around here...Update 1, the big guys got hit. Update 2, some tier 2 guys got penalized and all tier 2 directories naturally lost rank because the big guys no longer had a high score to pass down. Update 3, smaller directories lost their scores because the bigger sites providing them with juice were no longer doing so. Several updates later the algorithm changed to make it harder to get PR and just about every site, directory or otherwise, lost a point or two. Anyone who was playing the PR = quality = paid $ubmissions got whacked eventually. I doubt a reinclusion request or making things no-follow will restore your PR. Blaming the decrease on submissions on your fallen PR would indicate even you value your directory primarily based on PR score. Stop chasing PR and go back to basics - get quality links to your directory from a variety of sources (irregardless of PR), maintain good categorization and quality links - create a site worth submitting to outside of a PR score. The irony is that if everyone had been doing that in the first place, Google would never have felt the need to penalize sites for buying PR.
If it were a "penalty" your directory would have no PR. What you did was got lazy and slacked in promoting your business. Am I right? If that's the case, you need to get busy and never assume your business will not run without work ever again!
Most directories I've seen have taken a PR hit as Google adjusts the algo. Lots of blogs losing PR as well, probably from saturation. It's happening all over and rarely do interior directory pages have PR now. Google knows directories have very little usefulness to searchers and have just acted accordingly. I'd drop that re-inclusion request pronto because a drop in PR is not a penalty. That request might just prompt someone to review your site manually which could be trouble.