Google was possibly penalizing some of the link directories for awhile, pushing them way down in the SERPs. The penalties did not appear to be related to algorithm - possibly human selection. This certainly concerned Uncle Arthur, did it concern you?

Well some people thought that the link directories were going to catch #%@&, but they didn’t afterall. So everybody had their own theory - since Google had nothing to say about it. Uncle Arthur heard about one theory that goes like this: Google was evaluating paid links.

Based on some of the sayings by Google’s Matt Cutts we might surmise that unreviewed or poorly screened directories might be seen as mere link lists - given less credence or authority than well organized directories with quality sites of good content.

Uncle Arthur has another question about the “quality” of the websites in a directory. Websites that are loaded with spam are considered lower quality, apparently. So directories that accept these spam farms also get lower marks, apparently.

When directories request a fee is it spent upgrading the content of the directory by taking better websites - or is just a gimme the money website. Uncle Arthur heard that these gimme sites could be getting poor marks by Google too.

Even though only a fraction of the directories were penalized, they seem to have leanings to the above mentioned low mark situations. If so that means Google is getting pickier about spam related directories.

At SEOMoz an article titled “What Makes a Good Web Directory, and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones” was written by Rand Fishkin. In that article Rand suggests Google could be marking down some of the directories that violate its guidelines. The more obvious example would be the Banner Ads for paid links from Your Directory on SEO Sites. It’s Spam about Spam time.

So like many people Uncle Arthur must wait until Google tells us what they are doing or what they want. But it looks like paid links might get downgraded to some extent for the near future, especially the Spam brokers.

Survivor of the Perfect Spam Storm,
Arthur Browning