January 2011

In the past if you were penalized by the most popular search engine Google, it was pretty much a death sentence.

You could completely clean up the site, file a reinclusion request and own up to the various methods you’ve employed to try and gain an advantage over your competitors.

Things such as inflating your link popularity through excessive link exchanges, buying links, cloaking, hidden text or hiding content from your visitors, and the list goes on.

Your site may be added back to the index after a review and you served some time in the penalty box, and you might even get some of your toolbar PageRank back. But the site would never really enjoy the traffic and rankings and that it could have pre-penalty phase even if you weren’t coloring outside the lines.

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If you own a directory using one of the off the shelf scripts you might notice that there’s a number of short comings which may make some of your editing tasks a bit more challenging.

Some will permit you to ban certain words from the titles, URLs or descriptions and automatically delete those submissions or there are mods that you can add to the back-end that will do the same.

This saves quite a bit of time as you don’t have to delete the undesirable submissions for pharmacy products, adult entertainment or other sites you choose not to list.

Most of the scripts don’t handle foreign languages very well and you can get inundated with spam from certain European block countries. Another short coming of the majority of these scripts is that they allow automated submissions which by-pass the captcha and write to the data-base.

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