No more Yahoo and DMOZ?
2 weeks ago Google updated their Webmaster Guidelines to omit a single line that reads:
“Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.”
In the Google Groups thread, Google’s John Mueller explains why Google removed that line. Let me quote John:
“I wouldn’t necessarily assume that we’re devaluing Yahoo’s links, I just think it’s not one of the things we really need to recommend. If people think that a directory is going to bring them lots of visitors (I had a visitor from the DMOZ once), then it’s obviously fine to get listed there. It’s not something that people have to do though
.”
Here’s another quote from John in response to a question in the Google discussion group:
“we feel that you should not “force” other sites to link to yours. Obviously it’s good that sites link to each other, it’s fine to encourage that on your sites to link out and to make it easy for them to link to yours. However, I don’t think we need to make it a part of the guidelines that you should “have other sites link to yours” — they should be willing to do that on their own, it should be their decision not yours.”
It seems clear that Google is getting as far away as possible from paid links and directory links, this doesn’t mean that they will be devaluing the links but just not giving them the special attention that they have been given in the past.
So what does this mean for link building and SEO? SEO’ers need to start thinking out the box when it comes to crawling the web for possible link partners. Areas like web site performance, bounce rates and social media marketing are all areas which need to be seriously considered when marketing a web site online.
We already know that reciprocal links are the thing of the past and no value is added to a reciprocal link page plus the more links there are on a single web page the more link juice is syphened from that particular page (explained in more detail).
Google is looking at websites that can earn “natural links”, by being “natural” I mean that webmasters and SEO’ers should not be spending 90% of their time looking for potential links but rather focusing on quality content which will get visitors wanting to link back to the web site. This is known as the ORGANIC effect.
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