Recently, some of the more powerful web directories (AvivaDirectory.com, AliveDirectory.com, Linkature.com, DirectoryDump.com, etc.) have had their homepage penalized in the search results for popular terms such as “Web Directory” and even their own domain names. Today, I noticed the DMOZ has been delisted as well.

This likely wasn’t intentional, Google doesn’t like to make manual edits to their index – rather instead modify their algorithm to automagically filter out the results they want removed. I’m sure they’ve been tweaking their algo specifically for this purpose (filtering paid links) and has likely been the cause of the delayed PageRank toolbar export many webmasters feel is a few months overdue.

So what exactly is Google looking for when determining a site has been involved in linking schemes or buying links? When it comes to directories, most likely by looking for shared links among a bunch of similar directories. It’s fairly commong for web directories to rely on other web directories as their main source of IBL’s (in bound links). The more powerful directories are listed in pretty much every web directory out there, even the spammy ones. It’s also common for new web directories to seed their categories with authority sites, and it doesn’t get much more ‘authority’ in the directory niche than the DMOZ.

So, the DMOZ has been lumped together with all the other paid web directories because it’s being listed in a similar manner. Whatever happened to “There is ALMOST nothing a competitor can do to hurt your rankings?” Well, this must be the almost. I’m sure it’ll be fixed soon, though let this be a reminder that Google is on the hunt for paid links.

***edit 9-26***

Seems like this is all a misunderstanding:

Hey all, I dug into this a little bit with the help of a couple crawl folks. It looks like when Googlebot tried to fetch http://www.dmoz.org/, we got a 301 redirect back to http://www.dmoz.org/ . It looks like that self-loop has been going on for several days. We were last able to fetch the root page successfully on Sept. 10th, but from that point on DMOZ was returning these 301-to-itself pages, and after a few days Googlebot gave up on trying to fetch the url.

Well, there you have it. Seems like a reasonable explaination although I don’t know how someone could make a mistake like that – especially on the level of something like the DMOZ. Oh well.

© mdvaldosta for Joe Hayes {dot} Org, 2007. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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Fast foward to recent times, where in an effort to grab ahold of the open source, “web 2.0” crowd the Netscape crew decided to delve into the Social Networking scene with a Digg type clone. While many Netscape users were familair and happy with their current news portal (pretty much a rip of the AOL homepage), eventually it caught on and appeared to be growing in popularity as of late – showing a slight increase in traffic according to Alexa, the first time since late 2004 when it went on what seemed to be a never-ending plunge in traffic rankings.

So why am I writing this? We’ll, the social networking news site is going bye-bye, in their own words:

We received some feedback that people really do associate the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially controlled. In fact, we specifically heard that our users do have a desire for a social news experience, but simply didn’t expect to find it on Netscape.com.

Which makes perfect sense. Netscape’s gain in popularity by using their branding to grow a social media site is actually hurting their browser’s branding (which is what made them popular to begin with). So what happens to their growing userbase? Welcome to Propeller. Don’t bother following the link for a few weeks from this post, as the site’s not likely up (as of today).

Good move or bad? Time will tell, obviously there’s a desire to have another social networking site like Digg, though aimed at all markets. Shoutwire was a failure – likely due to the childish moderating, over monetization including annoying pop-ups,  and pornography advertisements (among other things). Other social media sites just don’t have what it takes (although many are still insanely popular – this niche is screaming for a leader), like Reddit – great site but’s stuck in 1985, SumbleUpon – another great concept but lacking in community, and a host of others but mostly geared towards the technology market (remember Slashdot? Well, it’s still alive).

I sincerely hope that Netscape does well with the launch of Propeller. They’ll likely port the large userbase over from Netscape and (hopefully) most of the community will follow it over there. They’ve only got one shot. I’d like to see at least a portion of the new Netscape news portal dedicated to showing the latest headlines from Propeller, that’s an important way to maintain value for those users contributing and alsohelping to  develope an ”authority” for the new site. As a webmaster myself, I’ve been using Netscape for a while to find new interesting content to talk about and recenty became very active in their community. See my profile.

Only time will tell if Netscape is successful, if they’re not I hope another site steps up. The web does, in fact, need a great social media site that caters to the average internet user.

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