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)?

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.