Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
You all remember the big directory ban of 2007. Well, I still seem to be caught up in this. Not sure why, but a little history first.
The site is a hobby site. It is also listed as a non-profit. It gets anywhere from 100,000 to 250,000 uniques per month. The directory pages get an average of 40,000 uniques per month. The site sells nothing. No adwords, no advertisement. The most popular pages are a forum.
About 5 years ago, I decided to build a niche directory as a useful tool for the users. All submissions are free, but every site is human reviewed before being placed in the directory. About 50% of the sites that submit get accepted. Every month, all outbounds are checked and broken links, servers not found, redirects, etc. are removed from the directory.
Back in 2007, when G decided to start penalizing general directories, we seem to have gotten caught up in this. Our main directory page disappeared from any results. When doing a site:mysite.com/main-directory-page.#*$!, the page is still listed, you just cannot get it to return in the SERPs... even when searching for exact phrases on the title, description or any part of the content.
The main page, which had a toolbar rank of 3, now is grey. When searching for the title, the site returns the submission page and one of the inner directory pages, but the main directory page still does not show.
I searched several forums, looked at comments from Matt C. and I don't get why this page was hit. Bing, Yahoo, and even the new google sandbox places the directory page at #1 when searching for the title. Various long tail searches will bring up many inner pages, it's just the main directory page that is toast. In fact, almost all of the inner pages show some sort of toolbar rank.
I thought that I would leave it for a while and see if it would ever pop back into the SERPs, but after 2 years, I am thinking there has to be some sort of penalty being applied. It is, by all accounts, following all the parameters dictated by Matt and others for being a good directory, except for being free. It is a niche, it hand reviews all submissions, it only takes quality sites, it is very easy to navigate, links are regularly checked, ya da ya da ya da. The only thing I can figure out is that the directory is free. Maybe that's the glaring no-no.
By the way, before the directory ban of 2007, the directory page was #1 for (niche) directory, (niche) resources and (niche) information. Am I missing something that may be glaringly important?
Thanks for any help.
1.) Maybe the site fits the overall profile of a 'paid directory', while it is not, and would personally seriously consider 'nofollow' on all outbounds, which 'indicates' paid, even though it's free.
2.) There have been threads I have read recently about 'keyword in link text' density and would consider the 'link to the home page text' and if it is essentially the same with a large number of pages with multiple links to the home page I would probably consider 'nofollow' on a number of those also.
EG If you have 20,000 pages and link to the home page with the same text at the top, bottom and middle of each page you have 60,000 'counted' links with exactly the same anchor... 1/3 of those should tell the story to G, so I would seriously consider 'nofollow' on the lower two sets.
BTW: I'm a bit nutty and have been known to use 'nofollow' extensively on internal navigation on sites... Your results may vary using either technique!
Over the last several years I've submitted my sites to hundreds of free directories, and few if any appear to have been penalized. In fact, I've seen many of my sites' listings in these free directories show up in Google Webmaster Tools external links lists.
So I don't think that being free would have caused a problem with your directory
About 50% of the sites that submit get accepted.
Do you edit these listings, or publish them as submitted? A great many of the grey-barred pages I've seen not only look like link lists, as tedster noted, but they also don't have much unique content. Chances are that most of the content submitted to you is the same boiler-plate text that's submitted elsewhere, so editing is necessary if you want your content to be unique.
If your pages are too keyword-heavy, that might cause Google to view them as spam.
I myself would not use "nofollow" on outbounds, as that defeats the point of a directory. Google does reward, I feel, for good quality outbound links, but not for overdoing it or for not doing it carefully. 50% sounds like too high an acceptance rate, but I don't know how self-selecting your submissions are.
Also, you don't mention categorization. If you haven't done so, I'd suggest that you limit page size and make the directory more user-friendly (and more Google-friendly) by breaking the pages into well-organized categories.
Does robots.txt mention that page in any way?
50% sounds like too high an acceptance rate
When you check the suggestions, how much attention do you pay to who they're linking out to? Because that's one way you could easily find yourself associated with a bad neighbourhood. If you find the website has a links page with a small selection of on-topic industry links, then fine. But if you're looking at long lists of links, or even mini directories, and a high proportion of them are unrelated to the site in question, or are otherwise spammy, then steer clear.
The site is very much like Yahoo, visually. Everything is broken down into main categories down to sub categories. There is breadcrumb navigation at the top of each page that links back to the main page, the main category and the subcatgory... nothing goes deeper then that.
There are no keywords in any of the navigation, though I thought there should be. Yet it's the inner pages that rank well and the main (root) page that doesn't rank at all. Even though it appears to be directory driven, the DB and app is just smoke and mirrors when it comes to navigation. In other words, a link on page 1010 would have appfile?page=1010 in the url and would indicate a main category of 1000 with a subcategory of 10. There is also a table that loads these main and subcatgories strictly for naming purposes. (I hope this is making sense here... It was the slickest and easiest way to put this together. In fact, some other directory sites have actually asked to buy the app because of the way it is designed.) There are 22 main categories that average about 50 outgoing links, and 73 subcategories that can have 50 to 100 links.
About a year ago, I did experiment with nofollow tags in the internal navigation. Left it for about 6 months and saw no change. There are only about 6 subcategories that actually have more then 100 links in them, the other main and subcategories have less...
If you search in G for specific categories like (niche) (type) in Mexico, you will actually find my page in the top 5. Like I said, it isn't the inner pages I am having trouble with. It is just the main page which lists the main and sub categories. I would think this would rule out the navigation and the content of the subsequent pages since those pages are already in the SERPs and doing fine.
Even the submission page is listed in the SERPs when searching for submit (niche) directory, add your site (niche), or a bunch of combinations of this.
You may be spot on with this. The main page has less content then links...
Our (niche) Directory and Resource pages are a list of quality (niche) related websites that have all been personally checked by our staff to bring you the best in (niche) information from around the world. It is our goal to make these resources the "go to" place for anyone searching for quality (niche) information.
That's pretty much it, and then navigation below broken up like the Yahoo directory.
