Google and Yahoo! have been working hard over the past several years to clean up web spam, and discredit websites that use questionable tactics to increase rankings.  In fact, search engines have been penalizing websites, and filtering link publishers since at least 2002. Back then filtering paid linking was much more selective and wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as the operations running today.

Increasing your website’s link popularity is vital to the growth of your online brand, at least for most of us. Unfortunately, many traditional best practice link building models have come under fire. Rather than simply discrediting paid links Google has taken action to penalize in varying degrees some websites that participate in certain link building type programs. Generally these penalties are at the keyword-level, affecting only one phrase, which is much better than a site-wide penalty.  Directory registration is one example. There are many ethical ways to build links using directories, but unfortunately the layman webmaster can’t tell the difference between a valuable link-passing directory, and one which has been filtered in Google. Often, the filtered directories still have PageRank and pages indexed in the Google database.  Read Complete Visibility Article > Article written by Joe Griffin