The case where EBay is suing  Shawn Hogan and DigitalPoint for fraud is underway.  See our post from Oct 2008 if you need some background.

The lawyers have been busy with over 80 filings, the latest being June 3rd of 2009.  Here is a summary of the filings.  Number 68 seems to add some details to the proceedings. It is a complaint against all defendants filed by eBay Inc.  on March 26th, 09. The document outlines the details of EBay’s case.

In section 53, Ebay mentions Digital Point Solutions (DPS) “advertising network” was involved in the cookie stuffing.   They must be referring to Digital Point’s Coop network.  For anyone not aware of the coop, it was a free advertising service offered by DP.  It was directly run and supported by Shawn.  ‘

Ebay seems to have a pretty good case although it is not clear how the technical aspects will play out in a courtroom.

Google rolled out another  full update of their toolbar PageRank yesterday.   It is a bit surprising as there was just an update at the end of May.  Maybe the folks at Google want to take the summer off.

So far the news looks good for directories. I am in the process of updating PR on the list of directories but it will take about 5 days to update the full list.  I can only update about 2400 per day.  I’ll be on vacation next week but I will try to produce some new PageRank stats (on a rainy day).

note: edited June 25th.

The following are some of the major factors that you can use to judge the quality of a web directory. SEO factors are the main focus of this article.

Links should pass PageRank.

Links should share PR with the site listed.  For example, links should not use JavaScript type redirection techniques, should not have nofollow attributes and should not be excludes by robots.txt.

Directory is ranked highly by the Search Engines

The directory should be well indexed by the search engines, especially Google.  Ideally a directory should rank high in Google for a number of different keyword phrases.  A site that ranks well in the SERPs (search engine results) is likely a good candidate to pass on PageRank.

The directory’s Google cache dates should be recent (including its main category pages).

Unique content

Unique content is a plus for any website, including directories.  Without unique content the Search Engines have little motivation to index the directory.   Since many directories tend to have many of the same sites listed, with the same titles and descriptions unique content can be a challenge.   Apart from the directory, any additional pages of unique content on the website can only help.  If the content is useful, it can bring in some useful organic natural links.

I have noticed a problem that has gotten worse of late.  Instead of creating their own categories, general directory owners are using scripts of ready-made categories.  I estimate that there are 500 directories using one popular category dump.  Some owners make huge networks of directories.  Why make 1 directory when you can make 50 or maybe 150.   These sites are often similar or exactly the same.   The worst situation is an owner offering to list your site on a large amount of directories for a fixed price.  These directories will often have nothing but duplicate content.

Hosting on unique IPs

Most directories use shared hosting, which does not pose any problems.   The problem occurs when an owner hosts a large amount of directories o the same IP.   There are many large network of directories hosted on the same IP or the same IP c class.   I have seen networks exceeding 250 directories.  From my experience the majority of these never rise above PR0 or N/A.   Here are some examples from our listings.

http://web-directories.ws/General/Free/page-73.html

http://web-directories.ws/General/Free/page-74.html

http://web-directories.ws/Niche/Real_Estate/page-5.html

Eventually, a good portion of these are allowed to die. It could be that Google does not like networks of sites.  It could be the duplicate IPs.  It could be the duplicate content.  It could simply that an owner of 100 cookie cutter directories does not put much care into running and promoting each individual site.

Regardless of the reason, I have found that networks hosted on the same IP are a poor sign of quality and a good indicator of a poor future for the directories.

Age of site

All else being equal, older sites have always done better in the search engines.  Google is very dedicated to fighting spam.   It is reasonable to assume that older sites have a better change to being trusted than new ones.

Age as a directory

Directories are often created using dropped domains that have PageRank.   Since this practice happens frequently, it is safe to assume that Google can identify this change

Quantity and quality of inbound links

A good directory would have a good number of quality inbound links.  The number of links from different domains and different IPs would be more important than the total number of links.  For niche or regional directories links from the specific niche or region would be advantageous.

Directory’s pages have unique titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords.

Some software, especially the free versions, does not have the capabilities to create unique title and meta tags for internal pages.  In other cases, directories do not make the extra effort to make categories unique or they do not understand its importance.

Solid editing standards

A quality directory would provide consistent editing of listings.  “Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods” (Matt Cutts). They would also re-edit listings over time to ensure that the nature of the site has not changed.  The directory should also remove dead links periodically.  Unfortunately this criterion is hard to quantify on its own without extensive review of the directory’s listings.  You can do a quick look for obviously spammy sites.

Ideally, a directory’s “acceptance rules” should be clearly posted on the site.

Clean category Structures

The categories should be well-designed with deep sub-categories.   A directory with weak categories will not be able to handle the volume of submissions over time.   There should be listings in the category you want to submit your site to.  There is also a possibility that a link will be worth more if it surrounded by similar sites and related text.

On the other hand, over 50 listings on a page are probably too much. The categories should not be convoluted by excess ads and popups.

Traffic

High traffic would be nice but don’t expect it from most directories, especially the free ones.  There are a couple of well established paid directories that could bring you some traffic.

Reasonably fast reviews

Paid directories are held to a much higher standard than free directories.  Directories that never get around to approving their free submissions should be avoided.

Support - easily available and friendly

Contact information should be easily found on the directory.  As with any business, you should expect a courteous response to your queries within a reasonable period of time.

Good design

A good, original design means that the owner has put effort into building the site.  This quality factor means that there is a better chance that the directory will be around for the long-run.

Your comments would be appreciated.

Publishers:  If you would like to republish this article please contact me with your request and where it will reside, and I’ll send you a short bio you can use with it on your site.

Today,  we are featuring an article where Jill Whalen answers a question about paid text links. The original article appears in Jill’s newsletter.

Hi Jill,

We are being contacted more and more by companies asking if we will add to our websites and/or clients’ websites a short paragraph of text that includes a link to one of their clients’ sites – i.e., a text advertisement. These companies are offering a monthly payment for this text and link. So this seems like a good deal for the host/publishing site.

Is there any likely negative impact on the publishing site’s SE rankings, Google ranking, etc., from doing this? We have not been able to find any info on forums that indicates this but just thought you might be able to reassure us.

Obviously we would be selective as to which of these text advertisements we accepted and would prefer sites that have a similar content focus to the host site.

Many thanks for your help and for all of the great info in your newsletters.

Kind regards,

Sue

++Jill’s Response++

Hi Sue,

Great question! It’s been a few years since I’ve discussed paid links, and it was previously from the point of view of the advertiser rather than the publisher. Before you read further, I suggest you read these articles as they provide historical context of the text ad situation.

• Buying Text Links
• Google’s Paid Link Smack in the Face

Now that you’ve read those, you understand that Google (and all the search engines, really) don’t care for text link purchases because they mess with their notion that links are votes, not ads. When they can’t distinguish the votes from the ads, it messes with how they determine the relevancy of pages.

While Google can determine some paid links from non-paid ones, they certainly can’t tell them all apart. They will probably know a link is paid for if there’s some special code you have on your website that automates the linking process, but if you hand-code a link into a page and don’t mention its paid status, they probably won’t know. (As a side note, disguising ads as editorial content is considered unethical by many.)

As an online publisher who wants to make money accepting ads on your site, you have some issues to consider and be aware of. It is my understanding that, as long as you somehow mark or distinguish the ads on your site as being paid for or sponsored, you won’t run afoul of any search engine guidelines. While Google would prefer that you take it a step further and add a nofollow attribute to your links, you shouldn’t have to do this in my opinion, because not everyone who has a website has ever heard about the non-standard, nofollow attribute. Of course, if you nofollow the link or even just mark it as paid, the company may no longer be interested in advertising with you, so you’ll need to keep that in mind as well.

Whether you use the nofollow attribute and/or mark the links as sponsor ads or do nothing at all to the links, the worst that *should* happen with the search engines is that the page that those links are on may not pass link juice (or PageRank). Notice that I said “should,” not “could.” I chose that word because I’m only providing my opinion. I’m not Google, nor do I have any insider info from them – in reality they can do whatever they want. However, my feeling is that they would prefer to err on the side of counting links rather than not counting them.

This all assumes that Google even knows or figures out that the links on your site have been bought. If you’re simply making a deal with another company to advertise their site on yours, and you don’t state that it’s an ad, it’s unlikely that Google would have any way knowing that money exchanged hands.

The main thing I would make sure of, if I were going to sell space on my site, is that the sites I’m linking to are ones that I would truly recommend to my readers whether or not I was receiving payment. That’s the key with any link. As long as it’s a real recommendation, you shouldn’t have much to worry about. (Once again, notice I said “shouldn’t.”)

As an interesting twist to this subject, there are some who believe there’s a double standard where SEOs are involved. The thinking goes that if you’re a known SEO, your sites may be put under more scrutiny in terms of the links that are contained within it. While I believe that’s probably a good idea on Google’s part, because you really can’t trust SEOs as far as you can throw them (kiddin’!), there is some additional paranoia about this issue that I’m not sure I agree with. See Michael Gray’s (aka “graywolf”) blog post here: How Google Profiles SEOs.

Michael believes that Google is “profiling” SEOs so that they can’t publish any paid links, while allowing others to accept money for links without any consequences. There’s also a Sphinn thread related to Michael’s theory where you can post comments. (There are a few comments and questions from me in there.)

All in all, I believe that it is every webmaster’s right to sell links on their website if they are so inclined, and it’s not Google’s intention to stop that. They just don’t want to count them as votes, which is their right as well.

Jill Whalen, CEO  of High Rankings and co-founder of SEMNE, has been performing SEO services since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor newsletter and the High Rankings SEO forum.

Here are updated statistics after Google’s latest PR update from the end of May. The stats were compiled from our database of 12,000 web directories at web-directories.ws.

Directory PageRank Statistics as of June 9, 2009

The drop in N/A directories is do to the major cleanup I performed, removing hundred of parked domains.

Directory PageRank again appears to be pretty stable.

The following factors may have affected these numbers:

• The N/A directories were reduced considerably this time because I manually cleaned up hundreds of directories that were parked.   I spent most of my time in the article category which had hundreds of dead links.  I will have to spend more time on indentifying these directories as they usually don’t get identified by our automated checks.
• Most of our submissions that we get come from brand new directories, meaning that we are constantly adding new PR0 and N/A to our database.
• I often go out of my way to add large networks of directories that are stored on the same IP (so that I don’t add them later without knowing their IP associations. More often than not these directories are still N/A or PR0 years after being created. I’m not sure if it something Google does or if it the fact that each individual directory is not really marketed much. It looks like Google is cracking down on these as I often see large blocks of NA PR when I do the updates.
• Since many of the directories are add by the editor of this site, the results cannot be considered random. The results of any given date can be skewed by the types of directories that were added in the previous 3 months.

As a result of the factors above, the  statistics produced are more useful when looking at long-term trends rather than the results of individual PR updates.

My first impression if Bing.com was Wow. It looked good, was very fast and gave good results. It is both elegant and intuitive. It includes some convenient features like “autoplay” tool that lets users preview videos from within Bing by hovering the mouse over them. It includes a lefthand navigation menu called the “Explorer Pane. ” The Explorer Pane can be very useful, showing you context specific information including related searches and your search history.

One problem that I see with the autoplay feature is that Bing allow users to preview pornographic videos from within Bing. You never have to leave the site. You just have to turn the adult-content filters off. It takes a second to do. If you have any problems just ask the nearest kid. I imagine that this feature would circumvent any parental software installed. I can see this feature changing once this issue hits the mainstream media.

After playing with Bing a bit more I slowly started returning to earth.  It was a nice trip while it lasted. Bing completely missed the mark on some searches. It found some of my pages that were nowhere near the most relevant from my site. I would not consider myself to be an expert on Microsoft’s old search. To tell you the truth I haven’t used MSN seriously in so long that I don’t what it’s results should look like but the results definitely looked better that the old Windows live / MSN results. I also noticed that Bing had had very up-to-date cache data of my sites.

Bing, like Yahoo, seems to rely heavily on onpage factors. Titles, descriptions and page content are capable of swaying results. If they ever gained a significant market share people would quickly game the results.

Google does not have to worry about losing it’s #1 position in the search world, not any time soon at least. On the other hand, I believe that Microsoft may have something strong to build on. I will look to see even better things in the coming year.  If they can improve on their  offpage search factors then I think they have a chance.  They may also appeal to a niche that favors style over substance.  Anyway, competition is good.

We recently added a directory’s IPs to our listings.  The main goal is to identify networks  that host large groups  on the same IP.  From my experience these directories rarely go anywhere.  Most of them end up as PR0 or NA directories.  Many are easily abandoned, since little effort was put into building them.

While cleaning up the article directory category I found many  domains that were parked.  By searching the database for the IPs of the parked domains I was able to find hundreds of other parked domains.  These are directories that escaped the automated dead link check built into the system.  I will continue to remove the parked domains in this manner. In the next while, I will try to concentrate on quality rather than quantity.