Is hotvsnot penalized?
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Been doing some searches for this directory, we have used them for quite a few links and now it seems as though they do not show up in serps for branded terms and the actual "www.hotvsnot.com" search phrase. Scary! Have a look let me know if you are having the same issue ladies and gents.
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Yup i just checked again and its definitely been hit. I also have some clients who are ranking very well and they are on this directory, however we are not seeing a negative effect.
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Nothing wrong with a directory link which is human edited. However we only choose a handful like business.com, best of the web and etc.. we definitely do not spam.
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Not really an answer to the question but I just googled "hot vs not" in incognito and this page is the second to last result on the first page, which is mildly interesting.
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We have also used them before, and to date have not seen a negative effect on any site that has links from them. BUT, since Google has been cracking down on paid link sites, we have decided not to add any new site links there. If you have links coming from hotvsnot, I would assume you also have links from other paid directories? Use the MOZ backlink tool to see what all you have floating around out there, as you may need to put a few disavows in place.
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Its still indexed on a "site:" search so it hasnt been de-indexed and it still has its PageRank so probably not a manual penalty, if it is suffering one. Google really doesn't like these kind of directories though so I'd stay away in the future - just incase.
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I just typed cache:www.hotvsnot.com and got a blank screen. When I looked at the code, I got information about www.hotvsnot.us and a small amount of content about adult themes. Definitely something fishy going on there.
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I always thought it was over priced for what you got
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without a doubt its either been hit or has changed something drastically.
From the image below - its search visibility dropped to basically zero on 16/5 last year so either has been hit (which it looks like), or changed something drastically.
http://imgur.com/QwcJC9v (UK visibility)
http://imgur.com/GGeWvGj (US Visibility)
While the visibility isn't a great factor on its own, when there has been a huge drop like that I suspect its been penalised.
From looking at the list of updates I would say it possibly got hit by Penguin 2.0 http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change or could have been a manual penalty.
But I would stay clear of the website and not pay to put anymore links on their website.
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