Penguin 2.0 rolled out on May 22 affecting 3.3% of English US search queries. After doing numerous analyses, it’s now established that basic linking policies like directory submission and feed submission no longer help your ranking and Google has started taking these as unnatural/unethical techniques.

Like numerous other digital marketers, we too, during the initial days of Search Engine Optimization, did submit our sites to popular and free web directories, something which we are paying for today.

After receiving the unnatural link penalty email from Google in May, we started reaching out to the link directory owners in order to remove our listings. To our utter astonishment, they started asking for hundreds of dollars in order to remove those.

I’m sure this is something that millions of webmasters across the globe have been facing. So what is a way out to this especially when you are not in a position to pay?

I started looking for a solution and finally came up with one. When we tried the technique, it worked! :)

The technique is pretty simple. The CMSs of most web directories periodically check the websites (if active or not) listed with them. You just need to forbid their crawlers/spiders from accessing your site.

When they can't access your site, they assume that the link is no longer live anymore. One actually notified us that we needed to fix our site or be deleted from the directory, LOL. Fortunately, our listing was removed within a week.

Any process that blocks their bots from accessing your website should terminate (if not all) at least some of them. The method, at least, worked for us.

So now you must be eager to know how we did it. Well, we forbade them via our .htaccess file. We just put a small script in our .htaccess file, which worked. The script is below:

RewriteEngine on

# Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} badsite\.com [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} anotherbadsite\.com

RewriteRule .* - [F]

Check out the image given below for a better understanding:

Below are some questions that might be arising in your head. Though we cannot reveal all the logs or data of our success, some result-oriented data (approx) provided below might compel you to take this course.

How long did it take for the links to be removed (if they were removed from the directories that were charging for removal)?

Like I said earlier, one even notified us to fix our site in order to avoid removal from their directory; we just encouraged them by staying silent. It was this instance that showed us that our strategy was working within a week of implementation. Though we didn’t get such email from all the directories, we got few more, to be frank.

It took almost one month and fifteen days. Alternatively, you can say that we waited for one month and another 15 days before sending our reconsideration request to Google by disavowing the rest of the directory links that didn’t get removed.

How it affected our traffic?

Frankly, we were least bothered about the traffic from the web directories and moreover because of the fact that they sent few. It was perhaps because people started relying less on web directories as the web evolved more and more.

We were more concerned about our lost rankings and the handful of people visited through the directory gateways didn’t mean anything for us.

How many directories were we able to use this for?

There were 73 web directories where we had submitted our sites with. Once the period of one month and fifteen days, we got 39 directories removed using this strategy. Eighteen were removed via repeated requests using email. We disavowed the rest with Google having no other way open as we truly hated the idea of bribing the directory owners in order to stay in the good books of Google.

What was the percentage of success we had?

54% (Approx)

Caution: This trick may not work with every directory script out there since it completely depends on how they are programmed to deal with if being unable to access your site, or if they even automatically check sites at regular intervals.

Good luck, and let me know if it works for you! I hope this will help you get rid of at least a portion of them.

P.S: For more details, visit this page of Javascriptkit.com.