December 05, 2004
Google and Directories
Been meaning to write about this one for a couple of weeks, but been too swamped to find 5 spare minutes.
It appears that Google may finally be doing something to combat the (somewhat) recent explosion directories. Mainly what I call fakey directories that people have been adding to their web sites in an effort to trick the engines into ranking them higher on their main terms and hopefully to get some traffic on supplemental terms.
It's not clear exactly how they're going about sorting out which directories are real and which are fake, but some early indications I've seen lead me to believe they may be looking at the URL structure.
What I've seen looks to be combating the default URL structure of a certain directory creation script that is sold specifically to decieve the search engines. Namely, if a site has a large number of pages that have a number as a directory in the URL, many sites are dropping out of the SERPs for the most competitive keyword phrases. These sites aren't being banned per se, and there hasn't been any PR fluctuation... They simply stop showing up anywhere in the top 200 or more for their most competitive phrases.
Whatever Google is doing it's certainly not perfect yet. In fact, some innocent sites who happen to have a certain URL structure are getting caught up in it all. That said it is still good to see Google at least making an effort combat these spammy fakey directory scripts/sites for a change.
I know I for one am tired of seeing spam for 1/2 or 2/3 of every moderately competitive search term.