After the 2007-2008’s global war on web directories, resulting in the google pagerank ban on most web directories on the internet, the DMOZ seemed to be the only Google accepted one. Being listed in it still shows great value for SEO as DMOZ’s database is imported to Google’s own database and is said to be holding one of the highest search ranking values atleast for Google. Also the same database is used by other Search Engines in the same way as Google does. Unfortunately there are only few that were able to get listed and most of them did it during the first years of the ODP. Unfortunately due to a huge variety of reasons the most important of which is the fact that it is Volunteer based and the problematic “Editor Approval” issue which forbids active webmasters to participate and rules out all the skill people leaving “new” internet users as the only type of editors. It seems that this strategy is causing severe problems for webmasters as it slows down the approval rates mostly because some of the DMOZ editors simply don’t care if they approve you or not. On top of it, since 2006 (yes quite a while back) DMOZ has experienced few severe website downtimes with gaps in month/s which resulted in major DMOZ editor fallout.
This should not be considered as news, but it seems their problems are never ending. Today, for the first time in year/s, I’ve tried to add my website, praying to the gods for a miracle, but unfortunately the DMOZ was dead. The only thing I got was a big error message:
During the last 10 years I was able to get only one listed there, and that’s from about 100 website applications. The funny thing is that I never got any response for denied applications which reminds me that I red in the Digital Point’s forums that DMOZ is deleting old applications if not processed over few months, which meant that they are deleting on blind, and there are not many editors participating in the first place. I also volunteered for editor as well, but guess what .. they didn’t approve me!
The only thing that puzzles me is why Google is not doing anything about it. After all a good financial injection will fix the whole DMOZ, but why bother spending few bucks (in Google budget terms) helping the Webmaster Society to get a good quality link and improve SERPs.
Your comments are welcome
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
If dmoz is dead then google and all other search engines will stop using it data. So, don’t worry be happy.
In answer to this same concern in the Digital Point forums, I explained that the above error is a known bug awaiting a fix by AOL staff, but it relates only to trying to contact a volunteer editor, and has nothing to do with suggesting a site for review.
It also seems that you might misunderstand the purpose of DMOZ, which is not a listing service, and reviewing suggestions is not a priority for volunteers, who are active in many other ways. Editors find sites wherever they can, and suggestions made by others are nothing more than one resource they can use if they choose.
As a final point, DMOZ is owned by AOL, not Google, so if any money is to spent, I doubt that Google will spend it.
Well, you seem to know much better than me, but I still think that the whole DMOZ volunteer editorial approval process should be improved. I saw your post saying that from few thousand applicants you’ve approved only few. Maybe that’s one of the reasons things are very slow.
Whilst I think it is a valuable resource, any benefit that Google gives to DMOZ listed websites should be virtually none until the whole process is improved.
Don’t worry Venetsian,
I wait more of 6 months for my projects
It is not dead actually … although i would like it taken down.
It is pretty unfair that one site is listed just because you’ve found someone to does that for you. Many quality websites were never listed as nobody suggested them … very bad approach indeed. However it is not dead just more restrictive.
Google still loves DMOZ very much. I have proven that.
Sometime in early 2008, when I was still very new to making-money-online stuff, I tried to experiment with making a website from Freewebs. At that time, I still don’t know that blogs alone can be monetized so I really wanted to learn to make a real website and not just a blog. So, after a few sleepless nights of trying hard to learn to make a website from Freewebs, a cluttered dessert recipe website was born. I know it’s not a good website and its contents were just edited copies from other sites. I was never proud of that website so I never showed it to anyone and there’s no promotion involved in building it.
Freewebs has a feature of sending your website to DMOZ after its publication. Not even sure of what I was doing at that time, I opted for this feature and after following series of instructions, I was able to send my dessert website to DMOZ.
Fast forward sometime early this year, when I was doing a job for a client where I have to send his website to different directories where DMOZ was one of them, I suddenly remembered the dessert recipe website I did on Freewebs. I found out that the cluttered website has been successfully listed in DMOZ. And when I checked the website itself, I found out that it has a Page Rank of 4 and it’s on the first page and top 6 listing in Google for the keyword “easy desserts”. I was surprised for it’s getting some traffic without even promoting it and the contents were not to many – maybe not more than 40 recipes all in all. This made me realize how important is DMOZ to Google.
Until now I have never promoted the website yet and I don’t really have any idea on what to do with it. This is the first time that I have talked about this and exposed it. It has some adsense ads and it is getting few clicks. If you have suggestions you can share to me, please let me know. The URL of the website is http://sweettoothsite.webs.com
Thanks.
I have to agree wholeheartedly with your opinion of the selection of editors for DMOZ.
If you admit you are a professional designer you will be automatically denied editor status.
That is silly and as the author says, leads to a lot of editors who are technologically challenged.
Frankly, despite being 11 years old, it is still a bit of a joke. They do not correctly list even the name of area I live in which had a population of 500,000 and of the 3 sites listed for my area (yep, only 3), 2 show page errors.
Sorta hard to take too seriously
I do believe that if people do not get moeny for what they do sooner or later they quit it. Why should they work for free? It is normal that now dmoz doesntr anwer any questions. I was trying to add some some dites but I think it is useless, cause you do not eben know if there is an editor of that part of dmoz or you should write to a higher category!