SEO Blog

Any SEO worth their salt checks on Google’s guidelines regularly to ensure they are keeping up with what is white hat, gray hat, black hat tactics. If you have noticed Google has now taken out the part about being listed in relevant directories such as DMOZ & has taken out the part about Yahoo! back links.. One, of these statements seems to hold more water than the other.

I must commend Google for no longer displaying DMOZ as a trusted site. Yes, it should be trusted, yes there are plenty of good people that maintain DMOZ directory, but, there are bad DMOZ editors too that require payment for inclusion. Good for Google to recognize this! However, with that said has the algorithm actually changed that much? NO! It hasn’t changed, merely the wording on the guidelines has changed. I think it is helpful for any company to get listed in DMOZ, but, has it ever been necessary? Great sites still get listed regardless if they are listed in DMOZ or not. That is the nature of the beast & once again proving content is king in Google’s search engine ranking algorithm.

Now, about the Yahoo! pay directory. I just think Google decided to take this down based on the fact they are moving to do ad based cooperation with Yahoo! nothing more. It was just one black mark they didn’t need for the inquiry into that deal being allowed. Thats it. Nothing more. Once, again has the algorithm actually placed any less significance on the directory, probably not.

As far as back links are concerned, well it still states pretty clear about how Google bot travels the web, its based on links. Once, again nothing has changed merely trying to get rid of the buying/sell market of links. But, that won’t change anything, unfortunately. No, even with conceptual search the algorithm has to get its context from a directory if its DMOZ or if its Yahoo! or Wikipedia.

So, in conclusion has anything actually changed? Nope, not a thing. The only thing that has changed is Google’s wordy for suggestions to webmasters. Thats it, pretty simple stuff.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 12:24 pm and is filed under General SEO Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.