Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi All -

Doug and Dennis, you guys nailed the part that was throwing me off. Specifically, that a "good" site should not hurt the rankings of another "good" site, but the dis-proportionate amount of links just has my "gut" telling me to get this corrected ASAP.

Rob and Omid, I really appreciate you sharing your real-world client stories! This helps me confirm my suspicions to jump on this right away.

Love the moz community, thanks a ton everyone!

Dario

Hi Moz Community!

We have a client in the manufacturing industry that is listed in Thomasnet.com for a about 75 different terms. For those that might not know, this is a paid directory site that ranks extremely well and has a very high DA at just under 90. These 75 different terms have spanned about 9,000 "dofollow" links on Thomasnet.com around 4 months back, right about the same time as the Penguin 2.0 update.

The link profile for this client had around 2,000 links prior to the 9,000 additional links, and our team is unclear if we should be concerned about these paid directory links. The organic rankings have dropped a bit, but that might be because of a more general Penguin update and not be directly tied to this paid directory.

I'm looking for some general guidance and recommendations in this paid directory space and help with Thomasnet.com if available.

Should these links be requested as changed to "nofollow"?
Will Google see this domain as one major domain link?
What other recommendations/experience with "quality" paid directories can be expected?

Thanks much and look forward to your comments and discussion.

Dario