Link building and driving traffic to a website are the life-blood of any successful web endeavor. Web directories work well but I have noticed another effective way a large number of sites have been building links and attracting visitors. This is being accomplished by offering free online games.

Most folks, from your average computer user to your hard-core gamer are looking to kill a bit of time each day relaxing and having fun on the web. If you can get them to come to your site to play card games, racing games or something of the sort then they might just hang around and become a frequent visitor.

Around 2 years ago I noticed tons of arcade sites popping up daily. These were using a low cost script and seemed to be an interesting way to start your own little web business. Around 6 months later the market seemed to be saturated and I saw many of these same sites being sold on webmaster forums. The traffic statistics on these sites appeared to be quite impressive but one common problem I noticed was very low income vs. high traffic. This really stems from the fact that most players of these types of games don’t click on ads, much like webmasters don’t click ads on other webmaster related sites (as directory owners have found out).

My conclusion is that you are better off adding an arcade section to an existing website than having a standalone arcade site because there is simply too much competition.

There has been lots of rumors circulating about “authority” listing in Google — that is when your site comes up in the number one spot for a search with additional page site links.  In this weeks Axandra’s search engine newsletter they published the way to possibly get these.

1.Your website must have a stable #1 ranking for the searched keyword. Other websites don’t seem to get Sitelinks.

2.Your website must be at least 2 years old. It seems that younger websites don’t get Sitelinks.

3.The number of searches and the number of clicks that your website gets for a certain keyword seem to be considered. Keywords that aren’t searched often enough don’t get Sitelinks. It also seems that your website has to get many clicks for the searched keyword.

4.The number of links that point to your website with the searched keyword as the anchor text seem to influence the creation of Sitelinks. Sitelinks only seem to appear for the main keywords of a website, not for all keywords for which a website is listed.

Those seem about right.  It would also appear that achieving sitelinks has nothing to do with page rank, as many sites that have zero page rank because of Google penalties still show up with sitelinks.

Many of us in the directory industry are used to the high flying rumors about Google penalties and here is an interesting glimpse into how and why these occur.

In a discussion about this issue, Google’s Matt Cutts recently wrote the following:

“When Barry asked me about ‘position 6′ in late December, I said that I didn’t know of anything that would cause that. But about a week or so after that, my attention was brought to something that could exhibit that behavior. We’re in the process of changing the behavior; I think the change is live at some datacenters already and will be live at most data centers in the next few weeks.”

So it appears this was just an error on Googles part, probably testing out some type of search result upgrades.  My guess is that this tends to happen quite often but under most circumstances it is in Googles best interest to either not answer or give vague answers because the rumors tend to reign in bad behaviour by webmasters and SEO’s.

This example is just another reason why directories owners don’t need to jump everytime a new rumor of a Google penalty is spread.

A funny sticky thread has appeared in the directory section of DigitalPoint, besides being quite humorous it also has some dead-on advice for potential directory owners.  Here are some of my favs:

Every statement on this list should be followed by…YOU should NOT start a web directory.

- If the statement “New High PR Directory” makes sense to you…

- If you bought a dropped domain name just because it had pagerank, and now you don’t know how to recover the money you wasted…

- If you have ever asked the question “How can I set my script to auto approve submissions?”…

- If you are scared of google…

Read the entire thread, here.

It seems to have become quite a popular past-time in late 2008 to troll the directories forums over at DigitalPoint and fight with directory owners.  My guess is that most of the trolls are folks that have tried to run their own directories but failed and now they are jealous of others that are successful.  Here is some sample post titles of trolls:

directory submissions caused massives serps fall - proof inside

Besides the fact that the OP offers very little data the main premise of it is all wrong.  There is no way Google or any other search engine will penalize a site for being listed in free directories.  It would be too easy to bomb your competition by submitting their site to some free directories.

One of the biggest problems with trolls is that members feed them by posting in their threads, thereby keeping the threads alive.  If you see a troll post just red rep and move on.

OP - Matt Cutts Confirms Paid Links & Google PageRank Update

Reply - I would like to hear Google’s answer to why it is so serious to influence the SERP with paid links but it is ok to pay Google via adwords to show up first in the search results?  So they don’t mind showing ‘illegitimate’ or ‘tainted’ results as long as you paid them for it?

(I do realize adsense is done with java so there is not passing of page rank but the point still is that these links show up first in the results, and that is ok because they are paid for)?

Forbes.com recently ran a sloppy article on directories and I found some interesting food-for-thought in it.

“That means that Webmasters don’t just use links to point audiences to relevant content or goods and services they might buy–they also try to create links to float their site to the top of search results. Such “sponsored” or “paid” links have long made Googlers grind their teeth. Now, as Google talks tough and takes action, Web denizens are starting to protest that even Google can neither control nor even clearly define all the inappropriate links.”

Well of course Google would prefer that you ‘float’ to the top of the search results by paying them over-inflated advertising costs through Adwords campaigns.  I would advise Google to spend some time and resources on getting rid of the ten’s of thousands of MFA (Made For Adsense) sites that are ripping off their paying customers.  If they want better search results then they should tweak their algorithm, not go after the directory industry.  Paying for a review and buying a link to game the search engines are two completely different animals.  If I have a resource such as a directory and I charge a fee to review sites that submit to me, why should Google care?  If I deem that the submitted site meets my criteria (whatever that may be) for listing then it should receive a backlink that counts for search ranking purposes.  If the sites I am approving are low quality or spammy or whatever other negative adjectives Rand or the other web gurus can think of then those sites should not be indexed by Google in the first place.  If they aren’t indexed then they can’t manipulate their way to the top, right?

This whole uproar is simply about money, Google does not like to share and wants to bully around all the little guys because it saw big link broker companies being born and thriving based on achieving ranking in it’s search engine.  Google figures why should it share when it can simply push the competition out of the marketplace.  I hope they end up eating a huge anti-trust lawsuit for their unscrupulous acts.

An early look at the toolbar PR update and how directories are faring is not very positive, so far many big players have lost 1 level of page rank, here is the early list:

http://www.idk.in/ PR5 to PR4
http://www.bigweblinks.com/ PR7 to PR6
http://www.allthelook.com/ PR5 to PR4
http://www.aerospect.com/ PR5 to PR4
http://www.kwikgoblin.com/ PR6 to PR5
http://www.apahcinc.org/ PR6 to PR5
http://www.sevenseek.com/ PR6 to PR5
http://directory.v7n.com/ PR6 to PR5
http://www.danielmillions.com/ PR5 to PR4
http://www.linksjuice.com PR6 to PR5
http://www.leadingdir.com/ PR5 to PR4
http://www.linksfactory.net/ PR6 to PR5
http://www.sleekdirectory.com/ PR5 to PR4

What does this mean for directories?  I don’t think it means too much, perhaps Google has updated their algorithm so it is harder for all sites to obtain a high page rank.  I remember around 7 months ago everyone was saying it had seemed to get easier to get a page rank of 4 and higher so maybe Google just tweaked it back the other way.  I don’t think a little loss of page rank means much for the directory industry as a whole because directory backlinks are still one of the easiest and most cost effective ones out there.

Since mid August the directory world has been buzzing about penalties and mysterious disappearances from Googles search engine rank positions.  Over at DigitalPoint Forums there has been tons of threads discussing this issue to death.  Many new forum posters that have never been seen around the directory forums have magically appeared to tout their opinions on what Google is doing and why.  There have even been directory owners purging their souls and begging Google not to smite them down, professing to have purchased links to obtain higher page rank and asking for the Google spies to please not further damage their business because they have seen the light and will not do these bad things again.

Really it has turned into a three ring circus with 3 major camps, the dooms-day prophets, stating that this is the beginning of the end and starting attention grabbing threads titled “Is Directory Business OVER!!! “, “Do you think “The Directory Business has Ended” and my personal favorite going strong after 29 days, “It’s official Google has opened up a can of whoop ass on directories”

Secondly there is a camp that is a little more low-key and not so excitable but they are looking for the reasons behind what has happened to see if there is any legitimacy to the rumors.  They start threads with more common sense names like, “Analysis of Google’s Directory Penalty” and “Directory Penalization Round 2″ — Their reasoning runs the entire gambit of educated guesses to pure speculation to hopeful prayer.

Last but not least there are some folks, like myself that have tried to add a little levity to the situation and call for more level-headedness and calm.  Let’s wait and see how this thing plays out, let’s wait for some facts before proclaiming the sky is falling.  I even posted a humorous thread (well I thought it was funny) linking to this blog post, Finally Contact from Mattt Cuttts on Penalties and it promptly got moved and buried.  Some loved it, I received rep with these comments: LMAO, that was great! to comments like: You are an idiot this is a serious topic!

I will sum up my thoughts and feeling by quoting a few things I have posted recently: 

No one really knows what gooogle is doing, so in order to give some type of freshness to this debate I think everyone needs to wait until some more facts are available, the proverbial ‘dead horse’ has been beaten to dust.

There has been no proof or substantiating comments from gooogle, so it is still not clear how or why or even ‘if’ there were penalties.

If there was penalties why does it seem blogs and other websites have been hit as well and why does it appear sites that have not bought or sold links have been effected. Why also does it seem 1000’s of other sites that blatantly buy or sell links (I have an example of maxlinks in another thread) have escaped unscathed? Why are the supposedly penalized sites making it back in the SERPs now? Why did they continue to be indexed at all? Why were they still ranking well for certain keywords (I mentioned one of my directories does not rank for it’s name but still achieved it’s highest rank for ‘web directory’ during this supposed ”penalization”). There are just too many unanswered questions for folks to be making blanket statements like that, it is not only unprofessional but makes people sound petty and jealous.

dotcompals at DP has posted a list of all the free directories started in September and as usual the list has most poorly thrown-up directories, but the one above takes the cake.  As you can see adsense makes up around 90% of the prime screen real-estate and it loaded about 3 seconds before the rest of the page.  It looks like this fellow has started a whole slew of these type of directories using the same keen sense of marketing savy for all of them.