Links from local.com after Penguin

[eddieredwood]

I have been doing some research on where some competing links are getting their links from and I see that a decent number seem to be getting some juice from local.com.

My question is- have the panda & penguin updates rendered these useless- or even worse can links from directories like this now harm my SEO?

[AlanMosley]

Matt Cutts recomened local or relevant directories, so i would not be concerned

[AWCthreads]

A timely question. We've got a bunch of local.com backlinks that just showed up. All are no followed and the anchor text is "website." How nice.

Our domain authority dropped a couple of points (perhaps associated with this - who knows), so I called local.com several times about the backlinks. Still haven't heard from them.

I don't know if Google frowns on a littany of no followed backlinks from local.com with a bunch of spammy looking anchor text, but apparently, SEOmoz frowns on it.

My intent is to ask local.com if they can at least use our store name for anchor text. If they can't, I'd just as soon they give us 2 or 3 no followed links with our store name in the anchor text.

If they can't do that, then I'd be fine if they just get rid of the backlinks altogether. If they're going to give me some directory love, do it right. If they're not going to do it right, don't do it.

[PeterTroast]

We're doing similar research on behalf of a friend who was hit hard by Penguin. A prior SEO had run a link building program that resulted in more than 50% of their total links coming from various repeats of the local.com directory. We're unable to pinpoint anything else that would have caused a precipitous fall in rankings. We've tried some other searches of the local.com directories using the methodology someone on SEOmoz suggested (i.e. searching for exact title tags) and those searches would indicate that local.com was, in fact, penalized.

On the surface, local.com would not appear to be one of the cheesy directories that Penguin aims to devalue, but I'm wondering if that fact that the content gets duplicated so many times (as a directory for multiple newspaper sites) might be part of its devaluation. A service business in North Carolina that shows up in a local directory in Oregon isn't really a quality directory.

We're still in the hunt but have growing conviction that local.com got hit.

[AWCthreads]

Hi Peter. Thanks for weighing in. Please let us know if you find something definitive.

I've still not heard back from local.com and have not tried in a couple of days. I'm curious if I can handle this at the news station/ newspaper level. Perhaps those outlets have some influence on how the content is fed.

[PeterTroast]

@AWCthreads: given how hugely damaging it would be to local.com to fess up to getting penalized, I'm guessing your chances of a straight answer from them are slim. Agree, though, that going to the parent newspaper would be a good possible route.

For everyone, an example of the kind of directory we're talking about is here: http://directory.journal-advocate.com/alexandria+va.z.html