If you have a paid directory, I'd highly suggest rephrasing anything that might suggest "paid link", Google PageRank, or anything of that nature. State that the cost is for review only and not everyone is accepted. Have a refund policy for part or all of the review fee. Look at Business.com, Yahoo Directory, and the DMOZ for ideas, because I doubt any of these will suffer from Google's wrath.
Funny Google hasn't affected Yahoo Directory and their $299 a year link selling. The whole thing about buying and selling links is to vague to really understand and I'm still not convinced this is causing the problems with so many sites. If Google is/does penalize sites for link buying, it's not only directories that will be affected. How many sites do you think have bought links at some point.....millions is imagine. The whole reporting sites is a bunch of crap. What's to stop someone from reporting a competitor or buying links to a competitor's site and then reporting them? Sure, Google has a mess on their hands but they created it and I say let them clean up their on mess.
Yup, you are right. For those who own their website, there are more than enough free directory out there on the Net. Find one now.
Lowster, take a gander at Matt Cutts blog, as he is the Anti-spam Guy at Google. He actually has a few posts on the topic. Do what I suggested above and I believe you can notify Google to check your site again after you make your case to them that you've been wrongly penalized.
Well........They kinda did write those "Ole fashioned" webmaster guides....right I don't remember seeing "buy links , and many of them"
This is true. However, there are a lot of ambiguities about their guidelines. As people have pointed before, there are plenty of sites that seem to be operating outside of their guidelines, such as the DMOZ, Yahoo, and BOTW. None of these use nofollow. Yahoo and BOTW charge a "review fee", which I think is justifiable. The thing that they DON'T do is advertise their PR value and they do appear to actually look at the sites and reject some. This is what the others need to do also. Show that there is a review process, explain that not everyone is accepted, do not talk about PR. Instead talk about how many visitors they get that go on to other sites. *I do think that most directories are going to die a slow death as Google comes down on them. Free ones will continue, but the value of backlinks from them is going away fast. I get virtually no traffic from directories, sadly enough. 80% comes from Google, the rest from other search engines and paid advertising and referrals.
Yeah, I spent most of the night reading this post by him How to Report Paid Links and his replies to the comments. He should have titled the post "How to Become a Snitch for Google"
people will stop paying for links pretty soon as google will clearly ignore those links from the directories they have already identified as paid directories.
Yeah, I think it's a pretty backward way of fixing a problem that they created with PR. There's so much potential for more problems and abuse. On top of it, the webmaster such as yourself would never know who could be reporting you. The only defense is a lengthy process of justifying your site as a non-offender, and waiting to be un-penalized.
It's not that Google doesn't want us profiting!! It's that having people sell links makes the SERPs more unnatural and CRAP. If all links are generated naturally then only the highest quality websites rank, not the websites which buy links. If Google was to let their SERPs turn to crap they would lose search engine market share. They didn't become the most popular search engine by letting people cheat the ranking system - they are the most popular because they deliver the most relevant search results. Note: Yahoo is the most popular website according to Alexa but Yahoo offers many different things including search, Google has a highest market share in the search engine industry.
Actually its understandable.. paid links mess up Google's entire system. Imagine all top ranks being non-quality sites that only want to earn.. would you still use Google as your search engine then?
I don't see the connection between the two, would you explain what non-creative has to do with paid links?
Somebody creative can create a nice link bait. If they can't think of a nice link bait they get paid links. There's also non-creative, mundane free options though.
That's BS, my directory is full of sites from creative people who have paid for submission and creative sites that I added for free. But what does creativity have to do with my post?
I'd say send a message to Matt Cutts' team and see if you were lumped in with others. Maybe there's reasons other than what you suspect for the drop. If they did penalize you, then hopefully they'd explain what it was that caused the penalty and give you the opportunity to right it. I hope it works out for you.
When I first started all this stuff about 7 years ago, I had bought about 5 links of top web directories during that time. 1 was joeants and can't remember the others. Well I only done it for the traffic and I don't think I ever had 1 visitor from them directories. So that's the reason I have never bought a link of paid to submit directories every since. I tried bid for position directory's about 5 - 10 months ago for the traffic. I bought advertising link on about 3 - 5 of them and I've had no traffic apart from about 1 - 2 uniques a month from bigweblinks. From doing that I have not purchased anything since as they were also a waste of my time and money. If you want traffic and good serps, then I would personally just purchasing advertising for the traffic and not for the PR. Afterall, if you get a lot of traffic to your site, it will improve your sites branding and then the backlinks will automatically come to your website.
yeah actually I think they don't want anyone making anything unless they are getting cut anyone who sells links is cutting into their business , which is selling links (adsense)