SPAM DIRECTORIES AND DIRECTORY SUBMISSIONS
Before writing this article we interviewed around 500 people, all active internet users and asked whether they use any online directories to find information. I am talking about general directories not topic specific directories. Almost all of them said they haven't used directory in their whole internet life. Only one of them said they used Yahoo directory so not even the big dmoz.org is in picture. It's very rare for people to use directories to find information. May be before 2002 when the search engines were not fully established people might have tried alternate source for finding good sites.
Today almost 90% first time visitors to a website come from a search engine. So what's the point with directories? When I started doing SEO I saw about 40 to 50 directories, today we see more than 5500 general directories in existence. Imagine each directory creates 10,000 pages that are 55,000,000 pages.
Almost all these 55 million pages are junk pages not of any use for the search engines. They might list a few sites but those sites again can be easily found through a search engine as to why people want to visit the directories to find a website. Search engines fought back strongly and almost all directories are devalued. They have a reason to fight back and they did for the benefit of their users. When a user can directly find a website via Google why to go to a directory from Google and then find a website which is purely meaningless and the search engines know it very well.
They want their users to go to the best locations, the better and faster people find good sites better their search engine will grow. In my point of view I will never value any directory other than dmoz and Yahoo directory as worth it. Dmoz and yahoo directory, hand picks sites submitted to them and we can expect a lot of quality from them, as both are run by really quality people who care about the web and so rate them much better than other sites.
Apart from them if we go through the list we can find some 30 to 40 directories that provide more than just a directory to users. Over everyone providing 5200 directory submissions, similar services are just trying to manipulate the search engines through artificial links.
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Screen Shots |
Below mentioned is the list of directories that are banned or penalized by Google. In the list of 2451 directories, 504 are penalized, 91 are banned and penalized.
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Survey |
A survey was conducted by The Daily SEO Blog where 2678 Directories were analysed and found that 20% of the Directories were either penalized or banned by Google.
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Domain names
These are the list of directories penalized by Google.
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Working Examples |
Example of a directory penalized by Google
Example of a directory banned by Google
Reviews for star link directory
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References |
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |