Thoughts on "Evil Paid Links" and death to directories?

Hey everyone, I'm finally getting caught up on the latest SEO news and have been reading up on this "fundamental" change to what Google will accept as a link. I'm wondering what people's opinions are on this.

Internally here we're debating if this means the end of all directories paid and unpaid.

I happen to agree with Bruce Clay with the thought on how are they going to make that determination of what is paid and what isn't paid.

Speculation here is that this will eventually grow to discount all directories which would actually include DMOZ something they value so highly at Google for SERPs results ...yet isn't giving the link because of merit and "word of mouth" as Matts Cutts put it, but simply because someone submitted their site (or paid off an editor..which is then a paid link ).

I think Google's playing in some serious grey areas with this.

We're still using loads of unpaid directories...and let's face it, there's loads out there....we take great care to find relevant pages but we 'are' getting great results with it...I keep reading that it's all over for directories...until I see it stop working, we'll keep going.

i don't see any bad effect... unless its free...

Don't pay attention to the fortune tellers, Google bashers and directory haters... it appears to be related to DUPLICATE CONTENT.

It is not only directories that are seeing massive SERP changes. We are seeing drops across every industry.

We did a study of 274 bid directories and found 91 were having indexing problems.

See the following URL for details ...
http://www.talkdirectories.com/general-directory-discussion/446-analysis-directory-indexing-problem.html

We have also done some limited studies of other sites and it seems to back up the conclusions --- duplicate content filter.

hmmm A very interesting take on this topic. Thanks for the input.

gazzahk: I think you were very close to the truth in another thread I was reading --- Supplemental Index!

It makes sense that the duplicate content filters were tweaked while they merge the two databases.

We are seeing sites lose thousands of pages from the index as well as falling in the SERPs. There are also reports of wild swings (up and down) in the SERPs for these sites 20-30 positions every couple of hours. But never improving.

However sites with unique content are not affected at all. Except to move up.

Sounds like a purge to me. Maybe these sites will come back after the data is cleaned ... maybe not. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Wow I think that's a good angle on things. Our own site is has some paid deep links but just shot to #1 for 4 main keywords where rankings were anywhere from #3 to #30. This is what confused me about what was being said vs what I'm seeing with ours and some client's sites.

Thanks for the insight.. What I've seen seems to support the theory.

We have been using both paid and non paid directories for years and we are not seeing any problems. I think it's sites that rely fully on low quality directories are the ones that are being effected but I'm not sure because none of my sites just rely on directory submissions.

We manually submit to something like 600 directories now and almost EVERY site notices an increase in rankings for the keyword we go after. Bottomline, I wouldn't worry about...

Thanks guys that is exactly my point ...

The recent crop of SERP drops has nothing to do with linking. Yet there are plently of self proclaimed 'experts' that are flogging their own pet peeves ... directories are dead or paid links are bad ... without a single shred of PROOF.

It just might turn out that some are bad webmasters and duplicate content is dead.

The day Google starts to penalize sites for inbound links regardless of how they were obtained or the quality of the site providing the link ... then that is the day I start working for my competitors.

I have to agree.. we use top directories and always find the best category and get very good results for those clients. I have yet to see any of them drop.

And I also agree how would Google know if a link is paid or not unless it's in an directory that requires everything to be paid - but we run a local directory for Toronto which we place our client's in and they aren't paying for it..they pay for our services and get a free listing but how would Google be able to know if they paid or not..

One thing I did notice when I ran some rankings today..clients who let me have free reign with their text (good text not spam and written professionally, like our own site is).. all saw increases.. sites where I wasn't allowed to work so much with the text or not at all barely moved.. I think we could also add into this swing more reliance on content quality and density to some degree too.

Oh.. and if you do "work for your competitors" .. I guess that would be us since we're both in Canada

Yeah I have read and heard everything that Matt has to day on buying and selling links ...

But Google also says there is almost nothing another webmaster can do to hurt your rankings.

If that is true the worst case is that you buy a link that does nothing to improve your SERP ... on the other hand you may get lucky and buy a link that provides some traffic. Where is the downside again?

Sweetcell Always happy to run into another Canuck ... and if the situation above ever changes I'll be happy to buy you a few links ...

lol.. This is the biggest lie google tells... A competator can hurt you big time... better links, better content, better site....

There are many people that play on the scare tactics.
From what I have read I believe the that google is very good are determining a good link to a site and a bad link to a site. So the best thing to do is trust google, and do as much net PR (white hat link getting) as possible

Very good point,

I have read what Cutts had to say and also read Bruce Clay's take on it which I tend to agree more with his onlook than Cutts.

We have only ever done white hat and probably the most anal white hat that can be done to be uber safe and all our sites are doing well despite the shake up. I think the ones playing the reciprocal, link ring games are gonna get caught.

So save the money on links and buy me a Tim's instead

"The recent crop of SERP drops has nothing to do with linking."

I wouldn't be so sure, there's an awful lot of incestuous interlinking, some of it like the use of multi-link sigs on certain forums borders on the reckless, IMO...