Google just dropped a pile of directories for breaking guidelines. Some even admitted they were paying for links to increase there pagerank.
“As many as 60 directories, according to this report, suddenly dropped in rank, leading to suspicion that Google has begun aggressively (and likely, manually) targeting paid link directories deemed to be in violation of the search engine’s quality guidelines.” said webpronews.com They also said Google hasn’t sent out notice, and hasn’t returned request for comment, so it could be just an algorithmic flux. <---Not Likely!
Matt Cutts clearly stated when the report paid links came out in webmaster tools that paying for links is a NO NO.
Matt suggests labeling paid links in the following ways:
· Redirect through URL blocked by robots.txt
· Redirect through URL using a 302
· Use Javascript to direct the link
· Apply the rel= "nofollow†attribute to the link
· Add to the page header
Danny Sullivan had to ban 2 bloggers and delete 30 posts that were just on fire. I cant remember were I just saw that... I guess I read and click to quickly at 5 AM
I even noticed that TextLink.com has gone poof! If you search Text Link you should see them up on top but as you see they are gone. I suppose Text Link Brokers .com doesn't have any paid links as they are still there.
rootly.com said "It has been said that it is 99% sure that one of the other directories that has not been affected has been going around filling out spam reports on the rest of the directories. I don’t know how much truth there is in that by way of taking out the competition."
Some people are willing to sacrifice there listings for a longer green bar i guess… I’m quite happy with my PR5. A PR 6 would be great but my #1 listings have beet out higher PR sites so It is more important to keep the SEO clean and list well instead of a poor serp and a long bar!