Ways of keeping your directory safe from Google’s penalization

Date Added: July 25, 2008 01:04:35 AM

DirectoryListing gives an insider view on what it takes to be a quality web directory. Quality web directories are well loved by all Search Engines such as Google. In this article, it explains a few ways on how to keep your directory loved by Google and one day achieve its desired authority status.

Over the years web directories have always been one of the great places to get backlinks. Times have changed. In the past 1 year Google has been known to penalize directories across the board reducing the Page Ranks (PR) of many once well known web directories thus rendering them less effective than before. Some experienced even more severe penalization which extends to the whole directory being de-index from Google's search engine result pages (SERPs).

There are many factors which leads to Google’s black book. Here are some factors to why directories are getting penalized.

Purchasing of paid links to achieve higher PR ratings.
This has always been considered by Google as PR abuse which messes up the objective of valid PR. There are some who managed to escape from the penalty while doing paid links though, only the unfortunate and particularly those who do aggressively paid links campaign triggers Google’s penalization easily.

Selling paid listings (aka selling paid links)
There are many paid web directories. Google has been pretty bias in the last 1 year. To them , selling paid listings or paid reviews are considered as selling paid links thus a liable offence of getting penalized. Many well known directories such as alive and aviva directory have been heavily penalized due to this. The biasness comes when big corporate giants like Yahoo Directory – the biggest paid link seller directory escape from such penalty. Google does not care how big or small you are unless you are extremely big. Go figure.

Acceptance of Spam or MFA (Made for Adsense) sites
Accepting sites that are of quality is very important for a directory to get in Google’s good books. Google and all other SEs do not like spam sites with bad quality information. Their goal has always been to provide the more accurate and quality information on their Search Engine. So why not flow along with their objective by accepting only quality sites into your directory? By doing so, you will find your directory well loved by Google anytime soon ;)

In summary, avoid these bad practices above, flow along with the objectives of SEs by accepting only quality websites into your directory. Promote it and get traffic. Along time, your directory will be loved by Google thus having the high opportunity of getting authority status.