Google was at it and kept to the word of penalizing sites who were openly selling links to compromise the Google PR by reducing their PR’s. Not just web directories, but many sites were taken down in the Google crackdown.

Yesterday, Google made it official that a sites selling links to compromise on the Google PR would be taken down in the SERP’s as well and has added the following to the Google webmaster Central Help

Some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

  • Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the tag
  • Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank.

If I were to believe Google then directories are at immediate risk and now would be the time to think beyond selling links and maintaining a dead directory. Well DMOZ has yet not done a “rel=nofollow”, so we still have signs of hope.

We did have a number of directories being hit hard the previous update but I would attribute it more to the unhealthy link building than to selling links.

I could be wrong, but we still have most directories doing well and now would be the time to capitalize on that.

Build a resource and not a PR whore.