About a month ago we reported that stories of mass de-indexing of directories on Google were likely a bit erroneous and there was little evidence to support that theory. Considering we had no historic data, it was hard to truly say what was going on.
Since then we’ve ran the same list of some 1000 directories again to see what was going on. Here’s the findings over the three times (over 4 weeks) we researched it;
High End Directories (based on homepage TBPR);
- round 1; 1.3% not indexed
- round 2; 1.6% not indexed
Mid Range directories;
- round 1; 5.2% not indexed
- round 2; 6.1% not indexed
- round 3; 9.1% not indexed
Low end directories;
- round 1; 15.76% not indexed
- round 2; 16.23% not indexed
- round 3; 19.43% not indexed
It bears keeping in mind there is a natural attrition to be found as directories do tend to come and go from what we’ve learned talking to those that provide services in this area.
What do we know?
Indeed the data does seem to intimate that ‘something‘ may be happening. But mass de-indexing? It doesn’t appear to be the case. Again we have to consider we have no historic data on the level of de-indexing or directories closing up shop before this was reported.
At the end of the day anyone with some sense can see that this approach to link building is likely short sighted. I would look at it as one would anything else; what is the quality of the site the link is on?
In talking with Googlers, in looking at various reconsideration request replies people have sent me, one pattern is surely emerging; the quality of the site matters. If it’s blogger outreach or directory submissions, there is some risk of being tagged for inorganic links from low end locales.
More on that next week… until then, play safe.
Note; A huge thanks to Wissam for runing the data for us over the last month. U da man!
One of several reasons we see many directories being de-indexed is because Google is aggressively going after self-placed links which obviously are not considered to be natural. And the worse thing I noticed is, not only the directories get de-indexed, but webmasters using those get penalized.