Below are our latest PageRank stats, compiled from our database of over 16,000 web directories.  Sorry it has taken so long to produce new stats.  We have been having trouble updating PR since Google changed their APIs in September.  David of PHPLD was kind enough to provide me with a beta copy of an update tool that runs on my local machine, but unfortunately a percentage of sites receive a false PR of NA.  This time around, I ran the script on directories that were PR2 and lower.  I then updated the PR manually in high usage categories.  I then reviewed a good portion (but not all) of the NA directories.  Over the last month, PR in the database has been corrected in various ways. Nevertheless, the number of NA directories is a bit higher than it should. Having said that, here are the PR stats.

Directory PR Statistics as of Feb 11, 2010

Directory PageRank have been very strong over that last 4 Google PR updates. The following table compares PageRank in our database, showing percentage changes between July of 2009 and the present.

Factors that may have affected these numbers:

• Since many of the directories are added by the editor of this site, the directories included cannot be considered random. The results of any given date can be skewed by the types of directories that were added in the previous period.  Of late, we have stopped adding most .info general directories and concentrated on adding niche and regional directories.  The number general directories has grown slower than other types.
• Some directories in the database have a false PR of NA (see first paragraph)

As a result of the factors above, the statistics produced are more useful in showing general long-term trends.

The directory industry got some good news of late  as Google decided to let a bunch of directories out of the penalty box.  Most of these directories spent over 2 years in the sin bin.

History

In the past, Google has periodically penalized individual sites.  In September and October of 2007 they hit a large number of web directories.  The sites in question had their PR dropped to zero.  These sites did not appear in the top 40 rankings of Google‘s search results, not even for their own domain.  For example, a directory called abc.com did not appear in the top 40 in a search for abc.

 Today

Today’s analysis is based on a list of directories that received Google penalties back in September & October 2007.  I have updated the list with their current PageRank. As for PageRank, I would have to say that it has recovered well. It is very close to the level it was before the reduction. In many cases, it is a point or two lower but this can be explained by the fact that the owners were not motivated to promote these directories over the last couple of years. These sites also lost many links because of the penalties.

The table below is a subset of the directories involved.  For a more complete view follow the link above.

I admit that I have not followed most of these sites closely over the last 2 years so if you have anything to add I would be grateful for your comments.  Thanks.

As most of you probably know, Google updated their toolbar PageRank on December 31st.   Overall I would have to say that the news was very good for directories.   As usual some went up and some when down.   It looks like the majority of sites only fluctuated by one.  The big news is that a bunch of directories that were penalized 2 years ago recovered their rankings and their PR.  I will complete a full analysis and post the results in the next couple of days.

Matt Cutts offers loads of useful information on his videos.  He covers a wide range of topics.  I like to listen to them (in the background) while I am working.

The following Google search gives you about 25 Matt Cutts videos.

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=matt%20cutts#emb=0&q=matt+cutts

Bing has  released  some useful link building tips on their blog.  The information provided gives some detailed information on how the search engines handle attempts to manipulate search results.  I would be fairly certain that Google follows pretty similar logic.

Content

Bing starts by repeating the same that Google has said for years.

“The webmasters who create end user value within their websites, based on the needs of people, are the ones who will see their page rank improve. So where does that value come from? Content. Good, original, text-based content”

Relevancy

 The importance links from relevant sites is explained.

Authority sites

 Bing explains that links from the most highly regarded, relevant sites are best.

Unnatural Links

Bing then explains that patterns of unnatural links activity can trigger a manual review of a website. They look at:

“the relationships between linked sites, the changes to links over time, which sites link to one another, and so much more”.

“When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction. If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index.”

They then provide some examples of activity that can get you in trouble.  Most of them were old news but two of them are important.

• The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time
• Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites

Suggestions for Getting Legitimate Links. 

The blog post then provides some hints on how to get what they call “good, legitimate inbound links”. Here is what Bing suggests:

• Develop your site as a business brand and be consistent about that branding in your content
• Identify relevant industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers, and media people and let them know about your site and its content
• Write and publish concise, informative press releases online as developments warrant
• Publish expert articles to online article directories
• Participate in relevant blogs and forums and refer back to your site’s content when applicable (Note that some blogs and forums add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to links created in user-generated content (UGC). While creating links to your content in these locations won’t automatically create backlinks for search engines, readers who click through and like what they find may create outbound links to your site, and those are good.)
• Use social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to connect to industry influencers to establish contacts, some of whom may connect back to you (be sure you have your profiles set up with links back to your website first)
• Create an online newsletter on your site with e-mail subscription notifications
• Launch a blog or interactive user forum on your site*
• Join and participate in relevant industry associations and especially in their online forums
• Ultimately, strive to become a trusted expert voice for your industry and let people know that your website contains your published wit and wisdom

Even I was surprised that they recommend submitting to article directories. I was starting to believe that article directories where less relevant. Matt Cutts - could you please confirm this statement.  I’ll have to spend more time on our list of 750 article directories.

I believe that Google has led the way with this type of detection.  They would also use these types of methods to identify paid links. They See the complete article of Bing link building tips.

If your site is not appearing in Google’s search results, or it is not performing as well as t once did you can ask Google to reconsider your site.  Here are instructions and a  video produced by Google.  The video contains tips on getting your site reconsidered.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35843

Matt Cutts has just posted an interesting video about Google notifying webmasters of violations.  As usual, he doesn’t offer anything too substantial but I think it is  two and a half minutes well spent.

This post is for users of the Digital Point Keyword Tracker tool. When Microsoft replaced it’s MSN search with Bing.com the results stopped working on the Keyword Tracker. The tracker has not worked since the end of May.

Today, an angel posted code to fix the problem.

Once logged in to the Keyword tracker, go to “Edit Preferences” at the top.

Within the preferences, find the field for “URL To Advanced Usage Script“. You should have specified the name of a script that you stored on your own server (for Microsoft and Yahoo searches).
Edit this script replacing the following line of text:

$data = get_page (’search.msn.com’, ‘/results.aspx?q=’ . urlencode ($_REQUEST[’q']) . ‘&first=’ . $start . ‘&count=10&format=rss’);

with

$data = get_page (’www.bing.com’, ‘/search?q=’ . urlencode ($_REQUEST[’q']) . ‘&first=’ . $start . ‘&count=10&format=rss’);

 Please note that the quotes above should be straight quotes rather than curly quotes.

. You can copy the code from the DP post for details.

If you have any questions you are welcome to post them in the comments section.

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

Directory PageRank Statistics as of July 7, 2009

Directory PageRank have been very strong over that last 2 Google updates.

The following factors may have affected these numbers:

• The N/A directories were reduced  because I manually cleaned up hundreds of dead directories.
• 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. More often than not these directories are still N/A or PR0 years after being created.  This time I added some of the networks but gave up because there were too many of them.
• 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 period.

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 PageRank updates.

The following table is a comparison of PageRank before and after the latest update.

 Here are the changes from the last update a month ago.

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).