Link Directory Genocide
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In the wake of a lawsuit an online company named KinderStart filed against Google for dropping its placement in the search engine results pages (SERPs), one has to wonder just what these people are thinking; they’re suing a now-giant corporate web presence like Google when, ultimately, it is not really Google’s fault that the website has fallen off so drastically. One only has to search through the site in question to see that it is nothing more than a complex link directory.
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It is my professional opinion that the link directory has been dying a slow and painful death for many, many months now, as if it was inoculated with some terrible and terminal disease. Actually, I’ve been saying it for about a year, and like my opinion of reality TV shows, enough is enough! I understand that I might anger a few with this article, but because I feel strongly enough about what I am going to say, I am willing to risk angering some in order to hopefully enlighten others.
First of all, one has to initially wonder what made the link directory such a hot commodity in the first place. It was my honest opinion that the issues of link trading were vastly different than they are right now at this moment in time, and at one point the link directory was an important aspect of the Web. Gone are the days where one webmaster emailed another and said, “Hey, give me a link on your site, and I’ll give you a link on mine.” But then someone figured out that this was just taking way too long, and decided to automate the entire process, and spawned the dreaded link farms.
It didn’t take search engines like Google and Yahoo to figure out the main reason behind link farms was to inflate their link numbers and propel them to the top of the SERPs, so this practice was curbed pretty quickly. It soon became necessary for folks to then find another way around the link farm. But in the process of this, people forgot why they were doing it in the first place.
Let me pause here in my rhetoric to assure you that I don’t think all link directories are semblances of link farms, as I do not; nor do I believe that all link directories are evil creatures that deserve to die. However, the few of you out there that created link directories to give the web surfer many options to find what they are looking for are, unfortunately, unnecessary anymore. Let’s look at a few reasons why.
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