can submitting get your penalized?

[solobrian]

Hi

I created a site, submitted it to over 200 directories manually and got accepted to about 100. MSN ranks me decently, but the same keywords for google are abysmal and I have a page rank of 0.

this is what AWstats shows:

MSN 112 47.2 % 112 47.2 %
Google 67 28.2 % 67 28.2 %
Rambler 22 9.2 % 22 9.2 %
Yahoo 20 8.4 % 20 8.4 %
Google (Images) 7 2.9 % 7 2.9 %
Dogpile 6 2.5 % 6 2.5 %
Yandex 2 0.8 % 2 0.8 %
AOL 1 0.4 % 1 0.4 %

Is there any way to know if google penalized me? If so, is it permanent? Its a run of the mill php dating site.

[justdave]

Directories are a great place to start, in my opinion, but they shouldn't be your only source of links. I do not believe that Google would penalize you, but then again I don't know the details. How old is your site? You could be stuck in the famous "sandbox."

[hutcheson]

It's not submitting that gets you penalized, it's being accepted.

If a high number of those 100 directories were known to Google as being "FFA link farms" (i.e. "having a high percentage of links into bad neighborhoods") then you'd get no benefit by them, and you might even end up looking like a slumlord yourself.

[Rosalind]

A high acceptance rate suggests that either your site is excellent, or that you provided many of these directories with reciprocal links. If it's the latter, then that is your problem.

There are some directories that will link out to nearly all comers, provided you link back to them. That could be the source of a "bad neighbourhood" penalty.

More likely though, is the possibility that Google simply doesn't place much value on directory links any more. This is because they bear some structural ressemblance to scraper sites, which Google has been trying to penalise for some time. So if a lot of these directories are based on similar commonly-used scripts, or if they are partial or complete Dmoz clones, then they may well fall into this trap.

My advice is not to expect too much of a boost from directories, because many of them won't even be around next year, or will change their linking-out policy to a search-engine unfriendly method. Especially not if your 200 or so are from the list I suspect you're using.

If you have made any reciprocal links that seem dubious, remove them.

[wmuser]

You may wish try Google's sitemaps
It will give you a quick idea whether of you was penalized or not

[tavikki]

Many linkdirectories are bad places to add your link if they require repr link. As mention above they can contain many bad links you do not want to be accociated with. And many linkdirectories uses the notfollow option so that when google spiders the directory they will not proceed to your site because of the no follow option. So a link there is useless.

<snip>

[edited by: engine at 2:01 pm (utc) on April 16, 2006]
[edit reason] TOS [/edit]

[wmuser]

Well said Tavikki

[anallawalla]

Its a run of the mill php dating site

Perhaps it looks too similar to other dating sites and you have copped a dupe penalty? If you are using a freely available script, this is a possibility.

[seoster]

Rosalind,

If directory submissions are done properly and under the guidelines provided by each directory, then the acceptance rate can go upto 80-100%.

We have done more than 20000 submissions for about 200 websites in last 2-3 months and have good understanding abt it now.

Directory owners doesnt like websites which donot follow their guidelines and most of directory owners are short on time, so they directly reject the link without making manual correction to that submission.

Directory submissions do help new websites in many ways. MSN and Yahoo are faster to pickup links and Google takes time, but those will show up soon.

hope this helps,

Thanks,

Tony