Links are good; paid links are not. If you really want to put your banner or text ads on a Mega PR site, ask the publisher to put rel=nofollow tag on your link, otherwise such links may cause put your site out of Google SERP even for the title of your site.It seems that Google has recently raided some of the directories that buy links and has de-indexed all the pages of these directories. These directories happened to appear at top in SERP for competitive keywords, but now they are no where. Even the directories are not showing up in Google for their own Titles.

According to a telephonic interview of David Eaves, the owner of Biz-Dir.co.uk, conducted by a WebProNews reporter Jason Miller, it seems that near about 75 directories have been penalized by Google for buying links. Though Google has not penalized Biz-Dir.co.uk and it is still holding good rank in Google, a lot of pages of Biz Dir have been de-indexed causing a sharp decrease in amount of traffic to this business directory.

As a remedy, David Eaves has started asking his Ad publishers to put the nofollow attribute on his ads. As David’s directory has got lots of natural links, the directory may be in a good position.

David has also commented that all the directories that have been penalized use a common PHPLinkDirectory script and has same link profile. It’s still difficult to predict whether Google has introduced a new algo that caught these directories or someone from Google manually checked those sites.

Though Google has started sending out emails to webmasters recently to inform if their sites have been penalized, none of these directory owners have got any intimation from Google.

The interview also predicts that all these directories have lost its link value. Hence sites listed on those directories are not more getting any link benefit.

SEO practitioners should be aware by now; you never know if Google is going to find out the sties listed on those directories and run a manual check as well.