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Went Hot: October 6, 2008 - 2:52 am
Posted By: Ruud 60 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.seroundtable.com)
Category: Google Other
Google's JohnMu explained it's just something people don't *have* to do.
Rustybrick/Barry: "I have seen this before - or similar statements. In my opinion, this will lead to Google taking stands against many more directories - more than they have ever done in the past."
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Is Google putting pressure on Yahoo? Or are they changing tactics. I've noticed that the site I've been most succesful with regarding Google PR didn't have a single paid link, not in directories or anywhere else. Maybe Google is thinking that if I don't pay for directory links, it's unlikely I'm paying for other links from blogs or elsewhere - so the links that do point to my site must be truely organic ones and of great value ...
lol
At time of writing on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356
"In addition, submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites."
From Google's Quarterly Live Chat for Webmasters (2008-10-22 at 16:00 - 18:00 UTC).
Q. Google recently removed the text "Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites" from their Webmaster Guidelines. Does this mean they are discounting links from those and other directories now?
A. Google continues to see ODP and Yahoo as quality sites.
[i]Off: ODP? Wasn't that, like, the Netscape Directory originally, way back?[/i]
Google had noticed lots of dodgy directories starting up, with a business model that was "pay us to be listed". Many of these were very low quality, contained a lot of dodgy sites, and could often be identified by their use of multi-hyphenated gibberish domain names. There were also associated businesses offering services to "submit your site to thousands of directories" (again for a fee) and recently there had been a lot of expansion in this area.
People new to be web, on seeing the recommendation to submit to directories, might be sucked into these backwater areas of the web and start doing things that may not help their site in any way. So we wished to remove that problem from people's mind. ODP and Yahoo continue to be good quality directories that you should continue to submit quality sites to, but you should not be getting involved with many of the other directory sites out there.
ODP is very useful in some countries, where due to keyboard constraints typing search queries can be a tedious process. For those markets directories are still key sites. In the US, Google has removed the direct link to the directory, but in some countries (notably in Asia) these links do still exist.
[i]The above is paraphrased from memory, as they did talk quite fast during some of the Q&A parts of the session.[/i]
They've removed the text from the help page mentioned above now, too.