Well, it appears that Google has decided to put the smack down on the proliferation of PageRank focused web directories. If you visited the Digital Point forums a week or so ago you could see the beginning of this nuking and slowly but surely it began to spread. Those directories that seemed to pop up every day with the promise of "INCREASING YOUR PAGE RANK" or "MOVING UP IN THE GOOGLE RANKINGS" were starting to lose their own ranking and while they were still indexed they were next to impossible to find unless you typed their URL into the search box. The directory owners, many of whom had multiple directories, started to feel the pinch. While there still may be casualties most of the damage has been done. The whole idea of putting up a poorly designed directory built to do nothing more but get people to buy paid links for the purpose of search engine manipulation are over. Some unknowing people may still buy these links but they will be few and far between as these directories become more difficult to find.
Rand over at SEOMoz wrote an excellent piece on the recent directory debacle and added some advice on how to build a quality directory that will do well in Google. I agree with Rand, there is nothing inherently wrong with directories. There are still quality directories out there that try to find the best websites and organize them in a way that is useful to visitors. The best directories will provide unique content and information about the listed sites that can't be found anywhere else. They will not talk about how being listed will increase your page rank and should be exclusive in that not every site that pays the fee will be accepted. IMO this was another problem some of the nuked directories had, they linked out to everyone who paid including a bunch of spammy pages that Google had already tanked. This clean up of directories has been a long time coming and hopefully it will lead to an influx of high quality niche directories as the pay for PR general directories die out.
Now some of you may be asking if you will be penalized for being in some of the bombed directories. That depends on whether or not you linked back to them. Since Google can't control who links to you they are not going to penalize sites for having one way links on in these directories, after all if they did your competition could go out and put you all over the bad directories and sink your rankings. If you have reciprocal links back to them you may be in trouble and it would be in your best interest to remove those reciprocal links immediately. You can't control who links to you but you can control who you link to and if you are linking to a bad neighborhood (like these directories) you could face the dreaded Wrath of Google. Another point to consider is even if you had only one way links from these directories you could drop a bit in the SERP. This is not a penalty but simply the loss of link juice from those directories. If they provided some link popularity to your site and that is now gone you may drop. Many would automatically assume a penalty but the fact is in most cases if you get some more quality links you can begin to move up again.
My advice to everyone here is to read the article at SEOMoz to learn more about what makes a good and bad directory and check to make sure that you don't have any links going to the penalized directories or other bad neighborhoods. And remember there are plenty of good directories out there but you need to know what to look for to determine whether a directory is good or bad so you can reap the benefits and avoid the problems.
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