Google Inside

The recent buzz around the blogosphere seosphere has been about the recent “ban” on web directories. It has been mentioned at Webmasterworld, DigitalPoint, and SearchEngineLand, just to name a few of the places.

As a recap for you, Google has manually added penalties to many of the web directories out there. Let’s take a close look at two in specific. We will be looking at Site Sift (http://site-sift.com) and Alive Directory (http://alivedirectory.com).

Alive Directory has seen quite a drastic drop in traffic, per the Alexa rankings are showing. This sudden drop in traffic is quite noticeable and can solely be attributed to the penalty assigned by Google. But what’s odd is that when you do a search for the domain of alivedirectory.com, you can see that it still has its authoritative listings in tact. When doing a search for “web directory” however, it doesn’t rank nearly where it used to. It used to hold a position within the top five listings, now only to be seen in the mid 50s.

Looking at a counter-part of Alive Directory, we can see Site Sift is still doing just as well as they were before. This web directory has its authoritative listings in tact even for a search that’s for a non-domain. The Alexa ranking for Site Sift is still relatively normal, even after the mid-September Google hit. We can see a slight influx with traffic, but nothing that denotes a serious Google penalty on the site itself.

The entire web directory community is still frazzled and bewildered to why Google suddenly put the smack down on these types of sites. The real question, why now? Why not before? Dmoz.org doesn’t seem to be affected at all, nor Google Directory.