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.