Hi David,

Directories are a difficult one. The recent Penguin updates (and to some degree, Panda) have pretty much destroyed the generic directories. However, the benefits of local directories and citations are still there! (http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/10322/The-Ultimate-List-50-Local-Business-Directories.aspx)

With regards to the particular directory that you're querying. The quality is low, even for directory standards. You're probably doing more harm than good by mass submitting to 50 directories that are linking out to all sorts of drop-shipping / foreign / low quality sites.

Matt Cutts also made a video explaining how Google treats Paid Directories. There are a few good directories that request a review fee that may be worth it - BOTW, Business.com, Yahoo, but the rest are just paid links.

What your agency are doing isn't the darkest of black-hat SEO, but it's definitely low quality, lazy and against Google guidelines. 50 directories probably won't harm your site. However if the majority of your backlink profile is made up of directories, it definitely won't be doing your site any favours.

tl;dr

• Local Directories - Good
• Genuine Review Fee Based Directories - Possible Benefits
• Mass Submissions / Paid Directories - Bad

If you'd like to read more, I wrote a post about my thoughts on directories back in September that I feel still rings true!

watch?v=rKUlVquEImc

Hi Kami,

It's unfortunate, but a number of modern day e-commerce platforms still suffer from poor canonicalisation and multiple URL's.

If possible, rather than blocking off access to those queries via robots.txt or meta, I'd start by trying to specify a canonical URL when a query is created.

E.G

Query: http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html?sort=title&use_selected_filter=Y&view=all
Canonical: http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html

Failing that I'd try to implement a "follow,noindex" meta tag or via x-robots if you're any good with apache.

If that's still a no go, then try GWT, Google is getting much better at handling dynamic URL's within e-commerce platforms and you can specify which queries Google should ignore directly within GWT

There's a great post on Moz that deals with e-commerce and canonicalisation - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/qa-from-ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues-webinar - I'd suggest starting there!

As a last resort I'd look to block the URL's within robots.txt, but this prevents crawlers from flowing freely within your site and can result in poor indexation.

Hi John,

Hope I'm not too late to the party! When checking URL's for their cache status I suggest using Scrapebox (with proxies).

Be warned, it was created as a black-hat tool, and as such is frowned upon, but there are a number of excellent white-hat uses for it! Costs $57 one off

Hi,

Sorry to hear you're having issues, we've all accidently blocked off our site at one point or another I'm sure.

You've done pretty much everything you can do to get your site re-indexed. The only other thing I could suggest is to do a fetch URL within GWT, then take it a step further by submitting your URL and all linked pages.

If you haven't recovered within a week or so, then it may be an idea to do a reconsideration request.

Good luck!

Images attached should help You should recover to where you were previously within a week or so.

1.png 2.png

Fastest way to do it would be through a combination of Google Webmaster Tools and Robots.txt / noindex,nofollow meta tags.

Firstly if your domain hasn't been verified within GWT, go through that process. Then proceed with the remove URL request within GWT. (Image Attached)

You will need to upload a robots.txt and/or implement the noindex meta tag within the header of the pages you no longer want indexed.

Example Robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /offendingportal/

Example Robots Meta tag:

That should be enough to get rid of the offending content from within the SERPS and prevent it from being re-indexed.

removeurl.png