Joe Hayes {dot} Org

Google doesn’t like paid links, they’re the thorn in the side of returning the most relevant search results. For the last several years web directories have been an overused method of not only getting new sites indexed but also ranked. One of the first steps many seo’s make for promoting a new website is paying for reviews (*cough* buying links) in popular directories. Well, Google has had enough.

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.