Ok, its been a while, so I think its about time for me to make a comment on what happened to a series of very well known directories. A couple of weeks ago a lot a directories had a google poenalty of some kind placed on them.

Basically google implented a new tweak to its algo  and a lot of directories were severly hit. The best way to see this was to actually do a search for the directory using its name. Many now do not appear on the first page of googles serp´s.

Anyway, there was lots of shouting about it, and eventually people then decided to get back on with there lives.

My opinion on what happened:

the directories that triggered the tweaked algo were all clearly agressively buying links from pretty much any source to pump up there inner page pr. Sitewide footers, forum signiture links …. and I suspect that the algo tweak has been an attempt by google to clean up a little on the link selling mess thats really causing there algo some problems.