and it is really misleading and annoying to rank those sites highly! As a "searcher" I find it very frustrating to get so many directories ranked highly in the SERP's, where I just have to "search" again, and as an SEO with a legitimate site, it aggravates me to no end! Don't they realize that the directories are just making money on Google's coattails by up-charging companies to be listed higher in their respective directories? You would think Google would realize they are just taking money away from themselves by not only allowing that, but actually promoting it!! Now I'm ranting! Thanks for your great work and insights! Dave said: This is an interesting post. I'd like to see some examples of what you're talking about since though I know spam is out there and does get ranked, I'm not exactly sure that it's a huge problem. For example, I just came to your site by searching for "high rankings" since I didn't remember your exact domain and I had already deleted the email... the very first result that I got was your site. In fact it took me more time to find the exact article on your site (though I probably could have found that using Google too, but instead I just went through the menus till I found the archive of newsletters) than it did for me to find your actual site. I'd say that's pretty impressive. In fact, I'd say about 9 times out of 10 Google