why are web directory loosing page rank? Are there any guidelines to follow for not getting penalized? thanks
bcoz they are not following google tos and making themselves link farms. Selling of links is against google tos and most dirs. doing that gets penalised.
A few quality directories I have visited I think have been unnecessarily penalized and possibly just guilty by association.
I agree with some of the points people have made above. Directories can retain / increase their PR if they continue to have good editing standards. Another reason why internal categories don't have PR is because directories rarely get backlinks for internal pages. Snowbird had written a good article about getting PR for internal directory pages.
Well it is really simple that Google does not want directories to leak link juice and that is the reason they keep on the penalizing the directories, But again a lot of it depends on the editorial integrity and the quality of your directory and you should not be selling links
Im not sure, because even if a directory follows all known rules from the start they can still be penalised. Similar to blogs that do nothing wrong but get penalised. Its a phenomenon, like crop circles.
Pipes is right about that. I have seen some quality directories getting PR penalty. In some case it's just a lack of further promotion though.
except from penalizations some directories loose their pagerank because some of the owners dont invest anymore on them for some reasons thatsome times are prety reasonable.
First point is page rank is just a number that is becoming more irrelevant every day. Second point is who says that the page rank is being lost?? I will throw out a theory that the page rank is still there but just hidden from showing on the toolbar. I have been telling this to certain associates for about a year now. First they thought I was paranoid, nuts, a whack job and then I showed them specific examples. Now I see them alluding to this same thing in posts here. Take a domain and 301 redirect it to a url you feel has been given a page rank penalty. Then wait for a page rank update and compare the page rank on the two domains. The domain that was redirected will take on the true page rank of the site it was pointed towards. I have specific examples of this and no I am not going to list them here on dp - you can trust me or not.... The next thing one wonders is this. If the true page rank is reflected in the domain that was 301 redirected why wouldn't the affected domain still be passing page rank as normal? So why do I say it is becoming more irrelevant? Because of the above - the number on the toolbar cannot be trusted...... Just a theory - take it for just that.
I agree with Swedal. The Google page rank changes for my directory from 3 to 2. It seems to depend on which featured links are being displayed. If the higher page rank links are showing the page rank is higher. The page rank number for a site should stay the same each time the page is loaded, to have any real meaning.
Bruce showed me the example a few months ago and he's right. The PR exists, it's just been stripped from the toolbar to deter link buying. If directory owners focused on a specific niche and only accepted sites they really endorsed, PR would be no issue.
Surely if you are not selling links, but using the directory to gain traffic and sell advertisements in your directory ie banners or adsense you shouldn't be penalised!
I'd suggest reading the ToS, you may find the answer(s) to your question there! Apologies for being off-topic and if I may seem like a dick, however it's "lose/losing" not "loose/loosing"
Basically in 2009 we will continue to see a continuation of 2007 and 2008 where the underworld of 'link development' becomes increasingly obsolete. Google has a real conundrum on their hands though; they cannot truly tell what sites are the best in any given niche and so people will continue to find ingenious and devious ways to manipulate search results until semantic search becomes a reality and only the best content actually gets to the top of results for KW queries. It has made search a complete joke and the results Google returns show this to be a fact. The irony is that people won't even give away dofollow links these days and that is actually devaluing Google's ability to return relevant search results. Yes, toolbar pagerank has become a joke. Yes, you can still get a web site to rank by submitting to directories but for how much longer? Unless your directory has 100k or more backlinks and hasn't yet been penalized to the ground already then it isn't worth submitting to, free, paid or open for bids. In general web directories and this forum have become as obsolete as the Edsel. Sad but true. Put whatever cool design, content, tools or features you want on your directory but the results will be the same; directories are dinosaurs in the face of an Internet ice age. Flame away fellas but we all know its true. Some of us just won't admit the truth.
herm... now google win... so go to google advertise your site... buy some adwords.. that's all google want... business still fight for business... after that they will go to firefox and google chrome... fight again...
It definetely appears that Google is beginning to crack down on how much credit is given to web directories. I think one big change we will see is that having a huge directory with thousands of links will be seen more as a negative in the future. Fewer, higher-quality links will be favored by Google. Just a guess though.
I am not sure I can agree with that. Too many large directory examples such as Yahoo, JoeAnt, BOTW, DMOZ and the list can go on. Maybe one day Google will come to realize that there are directory owners that actually want to build a quality resource that people can visit and find human reviewed resources on their topic of interest. Nah I'm dreaming.
It's more than a theory... PageRank is a very important factor when Google decides how a page/site rank. Infact PageRank has been there from the beginning and the reason Google outranked Altavista and other search engines is because they created PageRank. How to determine the importance of page by anaylzing the backlinks to the page. This is still very important and by changing the exported value, the value we all can see, they trick us. You should all get used to that the exported value (public value) might not be the actually value. Infact it never has been because they only export it every 3 months even if its updated all the time. But now they change it on purpose, that will make it harder... If the actually PageRank value was decreased, then you would also see a drop in the SERP. PageRank is a value of the link juice that is pointed to one page, an important value in the equation of how a page ranks in the SERP.
They are losing PR IN MY OPINION because: - 1. They are blatantly selling links 2. They rarely offer unique content