When dozens of directories and link sites were penalized by Google — dropped from organic page rankings into the “Supplemental” no-index / no-fly zone – bloggers in search marketing expressed themselves.

Some offered tips to stay on Google’s good side to avoid penalties for being too general or irrelevant as directories, still used in SEO linking strategies. Some offered advice on how to avoid being branded as manipulative directories and paid-links sites, looking as if they’re gaming the big search engines’ organic rankings and quality algorithms. Other SEM bloggers hummed children’s ditties in frustration at the abrupt disappearance of certain directories and links sites from the hurdy-gurdy marketplace. (See a roundup article keyed to Link Building by randfish at SEOMoz. “What Makes a Good Web Directory, and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones” at http://www.seomoz.org/users/view/63) .

I feel the frustration. Whether or not all those directories dumped from Google’s organic rankings are “bad ones” that obviously broke relevancy rules and scored too low on user experience, aren’t search marketers allowed to get cranky when so many decisions are made behind the wizard’s curtain?

Google’s quality ratings, scoring for page rank and e-SPAM penalties can work in mysterious black box ways. Pay-per-click advertisers see their bids and Sponsored Link results page rank ground up in Quality Score bar graphs. But the exact recipe for the sausage that comes out (closely guarded algorithms that decide minimum bids, page position) are held by the chefs on Google’s SPAM teams. Quality ratings and penalties are not always transparent to search marketing players at the receiving end.

Web sites, links and directories that drop like a stone from Google’s organic results – banished to the seldom-indexed dead zone called the Supplemental – don’t always know what hit them, and they hit many walls trying to climb out of that Penalty Box. The mysterious ways of black-box ratings persist, even if the banished employ all those helpful articles, with lists of tips and tactics to avoid penalties.

Rand Fishkin, who wrote Do’s & Don’t’s of the Good Directory vs. Bad Directory at SEOMOZ, said: “Honestly, I don’t mind the penalties, just the inconsistent way they’re applied.” And, “If the search engines want to get serious about paid links and manipulative directories, they’re going to need to hit a few thousand general directories harshly.”

Okay, it’s transparency and consistency; both would go a long way to restoring confidence in major search engine ratings, scorings and penalties.

I’m an old ice hockey fan. One bad forward from the Philadelphia Flyers started getting mail delivered to him in the Penalty Box. That’s how much time he spent there! The difference is that we all knew why his padded butt was parked in the Penalty Box: high-sticking, gloves down on the ice, excessive roughhousing. If behavior A, then penalty B. We always knew when the penalty box clock ran out, too. Nobody who reforms should stay in the box – or on the Supplement — indefinitely.