Directory Issue

Does Google suppress directories?

[Sailorman]

I work in a company that provides directory pages providing local information for about 11,000 mostly smaller towns in the U.S.and Canada including weather, maps, what to do and see, etc. We accept local web site listings. We have been operating since 1999. Many web sites link to us. In many small towns we provide the only such service.

In September we noticed a drastic drop in referrals from Google. Many previously indexed pages were dropped, a Google search on link: domain indicated zero, and the tool bar indicated PR=0 for internal pages. Various Google people have been quoted as saying that these symptoms are a positive indication that a site is being "punished" for "spamming". "Excessive cross-linking" is often mentioned as being considered "spamming".

A check done by an SEO professional did not disclose anything that could be considered "spamming" or any other problem with the site. However, our site is a directory and therefore unavoidably has many outgoing links just like any other directory such as Yahoo or ODP.

Emails to various Google addresses pleading for reinstatement were mainly unanswered but we did get one "form" response that claimed that the link: search "does not return a comprehensive set of results", and that we had not been penalized for spamming the index, and that we could "rest assured" that no one at Google had "hand adjusted" the results for our site. All our problems were supposedly due to changes in their ranking algorithms.

Some other larger sites such as Microsoft's Xbox site seem to be banned. Yahoo and ODP are NOT banned, link: does not equal zero, PR does not equal zero.

Now you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that the most likely way all the various Google statements can be even "technically" simultaneously true is if Google manually "unbanned" Yahoo and ODP, letting the algorithm ban us and presumably lots of other directory type sites. Notice in particular the "careful parsing" of the emailed statement about the link: search function.

Any advice on how to correct this problem would be welcome.

It seems to me that if Google is banning directory sites (except for some), they should be honest enough to say so and indicate how they select the sites to be favored.

[Clark]

Thanks sailor. I will definitely be rethinking this a lot...

BTW, if you are comfortable sharing your website with WW, if you put it in your profile I'll check it out as I'm sure much more experienced folk will too... Maybe there is another reason?

[rfgdxm1]

To Sailorman about those ODP sections. There can be some cases where a category will properly have just one site listed. One that comes immediately to mind is when the breakdown is by all 50 US states. [dmoz.org:8080...] (note: this is one of the ODP cats I edit). Do I have to delete this Al-Anon site because they are the only chapter in Alaska that submitted? I can also see some cases like that "Bill Oddie's Great Bird Race" cat where perhaps at some previous time there were multiple sites listed, and all but one is still online. This happening isn't a flaw in how the ODP operates.

Also, look at [dmoz.org...] If all those sites in the subcats were kicked up to this PR6 cat, wouldn't they get as much PR transferred to them?

[Sailorman]

Clark: I added the web site address to profile.

Rfgdx1: How do you feel about the many DMOZ pages that have ZERO listings, no content whatsoever?

[dmoz.org...]

The more I think about it the more I can see that having a DMOZ clone, especially a large one, is a big pain for the search engines because they have to index it and spider it. We are making some changes to correct this on our site.

Also, DMOZ seems to be slowly going down the tubes. Its been over four months since they updated their database. They claim 55,000 editors but many pages have no editor.

[Clark]

Did you used to show backlinks, because none are showing?

[Sailorman]

Clark: Yes we had the standard DMOZ box at the bottom of any page that had as many as one site link from DMOZ. We are rethinking this.

[Clark]

OK, that explains it, I'm pretty sure that's the biggest clue google has that it's dmoz clone...even though I've seen sites like bomis get some minor pagerank even with it, but my question was about backlinks...do u have the google toolbar? If not, get it, then use it to find backlinks or do a search here....because I show no backlinks for your site..