Thread: adding a directory as a feature

We all know that web directories are being punished by the big "G"... but what if ...

I have a PR3 niche website full of content... a site that has other subdomains, such as, gallery.mysite.com or forum.mysite.com ? and then add another subdomain for related websites to my site. And what if this happens to be directory.mysite.com and is running a popular directory script?

Will this site suffer the same consequences as those sites that are just web directories?

I have a links page on my main site and it has the least PR of any page on my site.

It's a nice thing to provide to your visitors, if the links are directly related. Also, it can be an option for reciprocal links.

Will this site suffer the same consequences as those sites that are just web directories?

Only if G deems that the directory is manipulating SERP and PR...

I see people "saying" that directories are being penalized (and some are), but that is necessarily statisticly accurate, and also there are more reasons to start a directory besides search engines.

On the first point, directory pagerank has remained pretty steady. You can take a look at this chart and see that there is a pretty normal distribution that is not changing drastically over time.

There have been some cases of directories seeing reduced or even zero pagerank on internal pages, but we are also seeing the same thing on forum software such as vbulletin and phpBB, as well as other CMS applications and even pure html sites. The last google update had a reshuffling of pagerank of internal pages, and this may even be something that is temporary, but my main point is this is not something that google did to just directories, and believe it or not, there are quite a few directories that still have pagerank on their internal pages.

Okay, now if you want to start a directory, it may help you with search engines in some ways, but please also think in terms of your users. Would they benefit too?