How to make indexu not look so much like a directory in the eyes of Google?

[jromano]

I think it is very important to make a web directory not seem like a web directory in the eyes of Google (as we all know what happened to Aviva Directory - 0 PR). How do you make it less obvious that it is a web directory in the eyes of search engines?

My question still remains, why can Google sell links to websites and then say it is bad for Web directories to do the same?

[Bruceper]

Aviva directory tanked because they were trying to sell page rank.

How do you make it obvious that you're a real directory and not trying to sell page rank? Any paid links could have nofollow tags added to them. The only reason to pay for links should be exposure, so a nofollow will do the job nicely.

They don't say it's bad to sell links, they say it's bad to sell page rank in order to increase another sites page rank.

[jromano]

Bruce, I think you are right. Do you think that if Aviva puts nofollow tags they will be reincluded in Google? Why directories such as botw or yahoo don't get penalized by Google? Does Google just penalize the new directories?

[Bruceper]

Probably not.

Why don't those directories get panalized? Because they're not selling pagerank.

The only way you can guarantee that you do not pass pagerank is to use nofollow tags. You could also use robots.txt to deny googlebot but that's a bit excessive.

It has nothing to do with directory age.