Q. What do you see as Google’s role over directories? Do you see Google indexing them different than other sites?
Google is working to encourage webmasters to increase the quality of their directories. They are doing this by devaluing ranking weight passed by directories that practice low editorial digression, keyword stuffing, give/sell non-relevant site-wide links and other spammy practices.
Directories have a high outbound link to content text ratio therefore their out bound link signature is looked at closer. Google looks at the quality of the inbound links and the quality of the sites that out abound links are given to. As quality sites don’t often link to low quality sites, directories that don’t use editorial digression and link to spammy sites will transfer low trust weight even if they have obtained high trust links.
The same goes for keyword stuffing in the titles. Google will devalue the ranking weight transferred when the outbound links of a site are consistently keyword stuffed.
After Google’s Jagger 1-2-3 update I thought directories and article sites would be the next to take a hit just because they were directories or article sites. I changed my mind on that after Google give some rating weight back to reciprocals. Reciprocals were such an integrated part of sites links that I think their devalue hurt the Google’s SERPs so they give some ranking weight back.
Google is taking more of a over all look at the link signature of a site than just saying these are reciprocals links and we are going to devalue them. Google is doing the same with directories. Google doesn’t need to make a list of all the spammy directories and devalue them. It can tell a site is a spammy directory by its link signature. This is why so many spammy free directories are not being crawled as deep and as often and many if not most of them are in the supplemental index
