We are currently studying over 300 bid directories to see how they have been affected, in what numbers, and with any kind of luck ... why!
So far we have looked at 274 directories and the problem is both worse than expected and yet encouraging.
The worst part is that many forums and blogs are stating only 60 directories were affected, but of the 274 bid directories examined, 91 are experiencing this problem.
Remember we are only looking at BID DIRECTORIES! Paid directories and I expect free directories are probably also having the same issues. (I'll leave that up to someone else to prove).
The good news is that ALL bid directories are NOT being singled out.
A number of factors have been looked at and we can't say why these 91 were singled out yet. But we can eliminate some of the factors we did look into ....
1. SITE WIDE LINKS
Many of the sites still in the SERPs have site wides on their pages and have also purchased site wide links for their bid directories.
2. PAID LINKS
The distibution of back links is relatively similar for both classes of bid directories. There does not appear to be any significant difference in the numbers or types of links employed. Each appears to have significant numbers of forum links, site wides and paid links.
3. SELLING PAGE RANK
Again there does not appear to be any difference in the distribution of PR. Some sites with high rank have been spared while others have problems ranking for searches of any kind. There are also many sites that have PR0 or N/A that have also been affected.
4. ADULT LINKS
We checked to see if sites that allowed gambling, lingerie, or adult links showed any difference --- no!
5. SITE AGE
There was some speculation that maybe Google just had not gotten around to some of the newer directories. There are still two sites in search results that were indexed at the beginning of January. In addition some sites are so new they only have 4-5 links pointing to their sites --- none paid by the way!