Web Directory News

Of late, Google has been cracking down on paid links - i.e. penalizing sites selling or buying links. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s anti-web spam team says, due to buying and selling of links based on Page Rank , webmasters and SEO/SEM experts are manipulating search results by putting low quality sites on top of search results which goes against Google’s TOS -i.e. providing organic search results based on organic link-building.

While Google has no problem if some-one buys links for traffic, it  asks webmasters to put NO-FOLLOW tag while giving out links or use URL redirect so that the link does not help in manipulating the search result.

Web directories by nature gives out links to submitted sites if approved. Many established and high PR directories also  charge fees from webmasters who submit their sites on them - basically, as review fee. As these directories have high PR on even inner-pages/categories , some directory owners try to market their directories on the basis of of high PR. There goes the conflict of web directories with Google. It has already penalized over hundred of high PR and established directories.

So is Google against directories? I personally think - the answer is a big NO. Because -

1) Matt Cutts, time and again told that, Google is not against quality directories - but is against directories that sell links based on PR. One can also demand a reasonable fee for the time it takes to review a site.

2)  Google webmaster centra, in its guidelines to webmasters clearly advices webmasters to submit their sites to DMOZ and Yahoo Directory, and other industry specific directories.

3) The most important reason for which I believe Google is not against web directories is it has not only penalized web directories - but it has penalized big and established authoritative sites and blogs all over the net. It has downgraded the PR of old and high PR blogs like searchengineguide.com and seroundtable.com for selling links. It has also decreased the PR of real authoritative sites like linux.org, phpnuke.org and statcounter.com.

Here we go. Google is not against any specific niche of web sites but is against all those that sell links based on PR.

There will always be  a place for web directories in Google world because Google technology also nees links to find and index new sites or contents. Quality web directories that have high editorial integrity will always be relevant to Google bots and help a site for SEO purpose. As the internet grows beyond our imagination, quality web directories can help Google bots and they are complimentary rather than antagonistic with each other.