Open Directory Project Archives

On February 20th, I asked our readers if they thought a listing in the Open Directory Project would have a major impact on a site's Google ranking. The response was split down the middle.

We only had 58 responses, which is very low for a typical Search Engine Roundtable poll, but the results were really down the middle.

As you can see, 47% said that a link from ODP does not have a major impact on your Google rankings. While 45% said a link from ODP will have a major impact on your Google rankings. Of course, the question is not clear cut and there can be "it depends," answers.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a Webmaster saying that a site of his recently was removed from the ODP. He said, soon after he noticed his rankings drop in Google. He wants to know if it can be related to the DMOZ listing removal or something else.

So can a ODP removal hurt your search engine rankings?

Most folks in the WebmasterWorld thread say probably not, but some aren't so convinced. WebmasterWorld moderator, pageonresults adds:

Google and others use the dmoz data. When your listing goes AWOL from dmoz, it will have an impact somewhere down the line. But, it shouldn't have that much of an impact to drag you down too far in the SERPs. Maybe one or two spots but nothing dramatic. I'm going to say there are exceptions to the rule too. If you had multiple dmoz listings and they were removed, that might have a negative impact.

Overall, I doubt it should have a major impact, like pageonresults said.

Some SEOs are a bit obsessed with getting in the DMOZ directory. But you should know the Pros and Cons of DMOZ and understand it can take a really long time to be listed in DMOZ. Also note that some of those cons no longer apply since Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all support the NOODP tag, a tag you can use to tell the search engine not to display your ODP title in the search results.

Let's poll our audience: Do you think the removal of a DMOZ listing could have a "major" impact on a site's rankings in Google?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Search Engine Watch Forums member asks how long a typical DMOZ submission takes to get approved.

The answer is: it's incredibly unpredictable.

Since DMOZ is a volunteer project and the editors are taking time to review sites, it can take anywhere from "minutes to a few years," according to forum member Birdie.

AussieWebmaster adds:

Is their an editor for the category you submitted to? if no then it could take a real long time. You could apply for the job.

That's right. If there isn't an editor, you might be waiting a very long time.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread poses an interesting question: there are a lot of useless submissions overwhelming the editors at DMOZ. Would adding nofollow stop these superfluous submissions and make the editors' lives easier?

For the most part, people think that it won't. Nofollow doesn't even stop spammers. (My other blog even gets comments submitted by spammers who explicitly add nofollow to the URL even though the blog software nofollows comments by default.)

But even so, why would DMOZ, which purports to be a quality directory, ever want to go the "we don't trust you" route of nofollow?

nofollow is for links the site owner does not trust.

At the moment a site link is added to DMOZ, the site clearly is trusted -- otherwise it would not be added. No obvious case there, either.

The bottom line is said by moderator pageoneresults: "Human Edited content should not require use of the nofollow attribute."

This statement, however, is disagreed upon by some users. What if a site that was included in DMOZ deteriorates in quality over time? Human edited content works for one time only unless there is a constant review of sites. Old links may lose trust.

Therefore, a few possible solutions are proposed: a system of checks and balances with multiple editors within a specific category and the ability for the average user to flag inappropriate results (for review by editors).

The WebmasterWorld discussion goes into a lot more depth about how DMOZ should continue now that it's seeking community feedback, so check out the thread and join the discussion.

This post was composed on October 2nd and scheduled to go live on October 4th.

WebmasterWorld members announced that the ODP has created a blog which is run by AOL staff.

That's great, some say. They always believed there was an intelligent force behind DMOZ and hope it persists. They hope that a new era is about to arrive with better quality.

I'd love to see AOL make a sincere effort to diagnose and fix the weaknesses of DMOZ (no need to repeat that debate/list). There's a huge opportunity for changes that are win-win-win solutions for DMOZ volunteers, AOL shareholders, and quality-oriented webmasters. The only losers would be the fakers and spammers.

My only gripe with this is that I wish it happened earlier. Right now, in light of all recent events relating to DMOZ (in a negative light), it appears that they formed this blog because they're in damage control mode.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Sphinn users report that the DMOZ homepage is missing from the Google results. While you can still do a site:dmoz.org search and find a few million results, searching for "dmoz" alone won't bring up the homepage.

A screenshot, taken by Barry on Search Engine Land, is below:

Does this have anything to do with Search Engine Land's report of the Google Directory Ban of September 2007? Danny Sullivan wonders if that's the case.

Truthfully, I wonder if it has anything to do with DMOZ's apparent corruption.

Discussion continues on Sphinn.

Jeremy Schoemaker, aka Shoemoney, posted on his blog that he's been extorted by a corrupt DMOZ editor. Without naming names, he was told that he'd have to pay $5000 to keep his website in the ODP.

There's been a big stir at DigitalPoint Forums (in two posts) about this, with many individuals suggesting that there's no benefit in being in DMOZ since it's nothing special. Still, however, a good number of people (and Google) put weight on the DMOZ listings and a lot of tools still put weight on it.

However, as forum members notice, DMOZ is pretty much dead and it's impossible to get your site listed there. And with corruption that dates back two years, why give juice to DMOZ at all?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums (thread #1) and DigitalPoint Forums (thread #2).

Update: Joost De Valk, a former DMOZ editor, adds more about the DMOZ corruption to his blog.

Remember the Google Directory, yes it is powered by the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org), well it has finally been updated.

After 19 months of having old data, Google finally pulled an RDF dump of the ODP directory as of August 7, 2007 this past Saturday.

The last time Google updated the Google Directory was in February 2006.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Word comes from the forums that DMOZ is again accepting submissions for site inclusions in their directory.

On December 20, 2006, we reported Open Directory Project (DMOZ) Coming Back From the Dead with the reopening of the editor area.

Now submissions seem to be back. I tested it myself and it seems to be live.

Now making sure your site is listed is a completely other story. But at least now (1) editors are technically able to review sites and (2) site owners can technically submit sites.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums, WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

I should be back from my vacation this Wednesday, this is just a guest post since I have some time.

Over the past few weeks there has been some discussion in the forums about how the Open Directory Project has not been working at all. Yesterday there was an update posted on the ODP home page saying;

Notice: Editing is Back!! Login now for more information - Dec. 18, 2006

So it seems like soon, who knows when exactly, you will be able to continue submitted sites for inclusion into the ODP directory.

The add form, but when you got to submit a site to a category, it takes you to http://www.dmoz.org/unavailable.html.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, Cre8asite Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Chris did the write up on Google supporting the NOODP tag last night. But it appears there is confusion as to what the NOODP tag will do in Google. I have asked Vanessa Fox from Google to clarify, and she explained that the NOODP tag will work for both excluding the ODP title and the ODP description from displaying in the Google results.

So by adding <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> or <META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="NOODP"> you can tell Google not to use the ODP title and description in the results.

You can see the confusion on this at the various forum threads.

Forum discussion continued at:

• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• DigitalPoint Forums
  
• HighRankings Forums
  

Recently there has been some concern at various forums about the use of Open Director Project (DMOZ.org) web page descriptions by some search engines as the default description used in the search engine result page listings. Simply put, if your web page is listed in ODP, the search engine may choose to use the description of that listing in its results, since they were approved by a human and are most likely accurate.

The problem is that many people have ODP listings that are outdated, and therefore do not match up nicely with the new page content. ODP is notoriously slow in responding to requests by webmasters to modify listings, so the idea came about to create a new snippet of code that would direct search engine spiders to not use the ODP description when indexing a page. Barry posted at SEW Blog today that Google is now joining MSN in recognizing the new "No-ODP" (NOODP) request.

Google has more information on this development at their Inside Google SiteMaps Blog, and the discussion is just getting started at Search Engine Watch Forums. Also see discussion when MSN implemented this in may at High Rankings Forums.

Jojo in our forums points out that site:www.dmoz.org returns zero results while site:dmoz.org returns over 26 million results. Is this an other example of Big Daddy at play?

That is the question of the thread at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A featured WebmasterWorld thread shows that Google Is Banning Sites That Use Open Directory (DMOZ) Data. The thread creator conducted a "study" that looked at the published sites using the ODP database. He then checked Google, Yahoo Search, and MSN Search using a site command, and found that approximately "50 percent of them were banned by at least one search engine." Google had a ban rate of Google 37%, Yahoo 11%, and MSN 9%.

Pretty much anyone can go ahead and clone the ODP by using the freely available Open Directory RDF Dump. But this is the first time someone did a study (not sure the validity of the study) showing which sites are banned and which are not. What brought on the study? Yea, this individual was penalized "after operating for more than five years." Was it specifically the ODP data that got him banned? Who knows. Was it the ODP data that got the other 37% banned in Google? Who knows... There are some out there, believe it or not, that use the ODP data to better their rankings, exclusively. Is it possible that some of those people try other things to better there rankings, that may have warranted a penalty outside of the ODP data side? Possibly. Does Google or any other engine want duplicate content? Not likely.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Now thats what we like to hear. It seems only appropriate right now for someone to came out with a good way to get an editor account on DMOZ. As we know those people over at DMOZ aren't very nice at times and securing an editor account can be harder than scoring a PR9. Jim Boykin blogged however on a detailed plan to become a DMOZ editor. It's quite an excellent article on how to become an editor that every good SEO should probably read it. As for applying to become an editor, if you think its necessary for your success then go ahead and do so. One thing Jim points out that I totally agree with is this:

To start with, I think DMOZ is highly overrated. DMOZ may have been a bigger factoring to rankings in Google in the past, but I doubt that today it’s worth any more than any other link of equal value - that is to say, I doubt that just because you’ve got a link from DMOZ.org that that’s treated different than any other link. There’s lots of people who haven’t changed with the times and are mistaken into thinking it’s a magical factor to ranking high in Google.

So DMOZ as Jim puts it is soo 2002-2003ish, I agree. Infiltrating DMOZ is so 2005 though. If you don't like the directory, then you might as well change it from within.

Check out Jim's - Pssst Giving Away DMOZ Accounts post.

People love to hate this directory and are doing everything they can to undermine it seems. There is a listing on eBay right now offered for sale by a seoblackhat of a PR5 category editorship that you can purchase for chump change. Apparently you get the login in and password details for the editor position with the auction and whisper not to say anything to DMOZ. Sounds like an SEO adventure. Worth it you ask? Probably not, but then again it could be for the right person.

Update: Appears that the auction was pulled and bidding is no longer available.

Forum Discussion at SEOchat

A thread named Dmoz "mini Directories'" Everywhere at HighRankings Forum discusses an old classic issue for the search engines. The Open Directory Project, DMOZ.org, clones. ODP provides a method for one to automatically create and update their clones at the Open Directory RDF Dump. You can either download a piece or whole of the directory.

So how many of these are out there? Some in the thread guess about 4,000. DMOZ lists about 360. But everyone knows that is not accurate.

A new thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named DMOZ Top Listed Domains discusses a list published a while ago at www.whois.sc/internet-statistics/dmoz-listings.html.

At the same time, a new thread on this topic was started at Cre8asite Forums.

When I became a DMOZ editor, one of the most obvious things to look for or ask yourself on a submission was: Does this domain name exist already in the ODP? If it does, then you have to be really strict about if a new (additional) listing should be allowed it. I assume this is very subjective and some editors are more easy going then others.

The conversation touches on that topic in both threads. Overall, the Open Directory Project has been getting lots of negative attention in the past several months.

A thread at Search Engine Watch Forums was split off of its parent, and named DMOZ Treatment of "Affiliate" sites. The thread has a number of views, from affiliate site owner to ODP editors and then in between. It should make for an interesting read if your either an affiliate type, or even applied to be an ODP Editor.

Marcia over at the Search Engine Watch Forums started a thread named What percentage of ODP submissions are made by corrupt webmasters? In that thread they get into the discussion of what type of directory spam they find and where spam is more likely to be submitted to.

The most obvious are categories "where there's tons of money to be made", such as m mortgages and poker. They say ">98% slammed by lead-generating sites" for those money categories.

But they also say its not always that easy to know which sites are submitted with the intent of spamming versus those that submit without really knowing the rules and guidelines.

I felt it was time for a good old fashion directory thread. And there is no better place to go to discuss clean, easy to understand, search engine optimization topics then High Ranking's forum. A recent thread named Buying A Dmoz-listed Domain From An Owner, Is it worth it? shows a member slightly obsessed with obtaining a link from the ODP. Jill quickly tells the member to submit it and forget it. Which is good advice but the discussion kind of leads the member to believe that a ODP listing is just as valuable to the search engines then a link from this site. I have to believe that a listing from authoritative directories like the ODP and Yahoo! Directory are worth more. There is the whole concept of the mighty hub, which would apply to a powerful directory like dmoz (odp). I certainly agree with Debra, "if you're listed in the ODP and your cat is picked up in a topical directory or listed on a category specific site, you're ahead of the game without even trying. For that, being listed is a great thing."

But are there any cons to being listed in the ODP?

(1) Like Yahoo!, Google sometimes uses the ODP title in the SERPs. Which can drive down your CTR for that organic listing.

(2) Dmoz recently shut down the Status Check portion of Resource Shelf which fogs things up a bit more then it was.

(3) Reports of Penalization of Particular DMOZ Categories by Google and PageRank0 are not promising as well.

(4) And you have Corrupt Editors running about.

What a dilemma.

You can blame me and the thousands of other dmoz editors that simply log in once or so a month to review submitted dmoz listings. I assume, it has become overwhelming for the senior editors to track down normal editors to locate the status of certain submissions.

Threads at Search Engine Watch Forums, Cre8asite Forums and WebmasterWorld all discuss the official news.

Following discussion by, and consensus of Moderators and Administrators of this forum, we have chosen to discontinue site status checks effective May 21, 2005 ... There were a number of factors involved in making this decision, but probably the biggest was that these requests were always beyond the mission of this forum. The original mandate of this forum was to put a better light on the ODP by allowing the public to interact directly with the editors. At some point the submission status requests seem to have taken over and almost become the focus.

See full explanation at http://www.resource-zone.com/forum/showthread.php?t=39125.

In the threads listed above, members discuss the pros and cons to such a decision and what they could have done to help keep it open.

I thought this deserved a quick mention for craziness and maybe some points for raising the issue that seems all to often sweep under the rug - possible abuse of power that takes place at DMOZ. I apologize in advance if the below website offends anyone, but for the most part I think if you create a website called "Corrupt DMOZ editor" and intended to let people know more about the inner workings you have some courage. There are really great people that work as volunteers at DMOZ, I have met some, but as the saying goes. A few bad apples can spoil the barrel.

The website, called Corrupt DMOZ Editor was created by a DMOZ editor who under multiple screen names (and growing) takes about the inner workings in details. She is taking the approach that before you can see the light, you have to deal with the darkness. Such as How to Bribe A Dmoz Editor. basically what you do is send the editor some funds via Paypal, before doing a submission, next submit your website to the category, and viola you have a listing. She also talks about abuse in regards to editors who routinely delay submissions or inclusions for certain areas, and sometimes even erase the submissions. It goes on to say that corrupt editors work in groups even mob units in order to benefit from the directory. You sometimes have to pay a boss above you a cut of what you take in. Whether the benefit is money, one way links, control, blocking competitors from submitting and others. Pretty darn digusting if you ask me, if true.

She goes on to talk about the prime reason she started the blog here. And how hot a commodity DMOZ links have become. If there is a microeconomy and people involved there is bound to be someone who will eventually abuse it. There is another post of of interest that talks about how to Sabotaging a Competitors DMOZ Listing for Fun & Profit. I personally wouldnt try any of those methods if I were you and I would stress caution on some of the things said on the website. It seems like submitting is huge waste of time, and while I have submitted to DMOZ for many years, I have decided last year to stop totally, realizing you can spend your time more wisely getting better links elsewhere.

I have heard so many stories of SEOs that have been booted from editing the DMOZ directory, I bet you have as well. A post at Search Engine Watch forums named DMOZ Abuse for SEO Contest discusses a case where one individual stepped over that line.

Basically, the "reported" abuse is by someone who is an editor at the Israeli DMOZ Directory and also is participating in the 1st Israeli SEO Contest.

Cre8asite Forum added a new forum (or changed the name of an old forum, I forget) - Large-scale* Web Directories. The * stands for, This forum is for the discussion of large-scale web directories, such as DMOZ, Zeal, and similar. *A large-scale directory is one with more than 10 full-time (paid) editors, or more than 100 part-time or volunteer editors (note: self-submittors do not count as editors).

So you can expect directories such as Yahoo (paid), DMOZ (more then 100 volunteers) and other directories like those to be discussed in that forum.

I am a relatively new ODP editor. Getting elected was fun and joining the group of hundreds (possibly thousands) of volunteer editors was very respectable. My category was filled with about a 150 sites waiting to be reviewed, so I began tackling the task at hand. Going through each request and trying to determine if the site's content is unique, useful and relevant to my category.

Some sites were a perfect match, all I had to do was clean up the title and description and click add. Other sites are just pure junk and are submitted by people seeking ODP links to boost an other page's PageRank, those are easy to detect and delete as well. However, there were many and still are many sites that are border line spam. Sites that look pretty, have nice information but in reality are just affiliate sites. To tell you the truth, I built one or two myself, but I would never dream of listing it in the Open Directory Project (ODP).

There is a thread over at HighRankings that discusses a thread over at the ODP's public forum Resource Zone. It covers a topic just like this, where a "Meta Editor" (those are ODP Kings) can spot these types of sites in a glance. I guess over time and with more edits, I too will be able to spot these types of sites. Until then, the spammers will continue to solicit links from ODPs.

Yesterday Google launched a new design, part of that new design was the removal of the "directory tab". DigitalPoint's forum, which has been doing just great, discussed Google's new design. That thread went off on a slight tangent, delving into the usefulness of the ODP or other directories.

I gave an example of its use when buying a new sign for my office. I think I first tried search at Google for the right company, but I couldn't find much for this niche. So I went to ODP's Signage Listings and Yahoo's Signage Listings. I then browsed a few dozen sites listed and sent an email with a spec to those I thought were up to the job.

Let me tell you, I am really happy with the final product. I would have never been able to find this company with a search engine.

Update: Just found out they made AskJeeves Sign.

Many SEO's try to get as many links from the ODP as possible in an effort to increase a site's PR. How much are ODP worth?

The question was raised at WebmasterWorld and GoogleGuy responded. "We can process the RDF file and count the number of listings just as well as someone's CGI script can. I'd concentrate more on getting quality links and not obsess about trying to lots and lots of ODP links."

Greetings everyone! Some of you may know me from around some of the various forums and I'd just like to say I'm happy to be asked to pop on here and offer some of my thoughts from time to time. For the most part, I'll be pointing folks toward interesting topics and discussions going on at Cre8asite Forums, but you can find me kicking around or lurking at many of the other places on the web, so if something strikes my interest, you can be assured that I'll blather on about that stuff too!

For my first entry here, I thought I'd bring your attention to some stuff going on over at Cre8asite in respects to the DMOZ. We always hear about how difficult it is to get into the directory over there. Most of the time it's because someone decided that the site wasn't good enough, or didn't have enough content. So, just what types of sites is the DMOZ looking for?

Cre8asite Moderator Jean Manco has been working on a, now, very long and interesting thread entitled New In DMOZ in which she chronicles her life as a DMOZ editor. Over the course of this thread, you can read as she describes the types of things that she includes in her categories, her thoughts on what makes for a good site (in respects to getting listed in the DMOZ), and just generally shows us what is good and what's not.

If you are considering getting your site listed in the DMOZ, or are wondering why your site got rejected, then this thread will surely be something that you can learn from. It's set up in a way that you can "play at home" and have a look at the category being worked on, the descriptions that were chosen, and - most importantly - get a look into what's going on in an editor's mind when they are doing their job.

One Important Note: Though Cre8asite forums has a fairly strong body of members who are editors at the DMOZ and the DMOZ Forum is becoming a great resource for learning about how the DMOZ works and such, it is not a place where you can seek specific advice about your own specific case. Policy forbids editors from dealing with specific cases and that's just the way it is.

Cheers! And Happy Submitting!
G.

Thanks to Fathom's posts at WMW on External Link Development and Internal Link Development, I was able to learn about a new tool. Not to downplay those two posts, both excellent posts and on par with all fathom's posts.

The new tool monitors your status of domains submitted to the DMOZ directory. Its free, unlike my SEO Count Google Rank Checker, and does an excellent job. I assume it just queries the dmoz application with the domain name in it. But it keeps everything in one place. Excellent tool.

Check out Seotie today! (nice ad huh?)

Google has said they don't give any extra weight for a link coming from DMOZ. That may be true, but a single listing in DMOZ can net hundreds of links from other websites, so indirectly it does have more value.

This thread shows how a single DMOZ link can give you 250+ links from different web sites.

Not really all that useful, but noticed DMOZ has a red button in it's categories now (bottom right), which shows thumbnails of the websites in the category.

It also looks like some coder over at Amazon or Alexa (same company, so whatever...) got bored and added a few minor things:

• Shows average time it takes to load a page
  
• Reviews were wiped out (although "star" ranking remains), and new reviews are now "Amazon" reviews instead of Alexa reviews
  
• Shows what percentage of sessions show popups
  
• Sccreenshot update form works now on non IE for Windows (now it's simply a link instead of a form)
  
• 3 month average traffic ranking seems to be updating more frequently than once a week on Monday
  

Speaking of Alexa... I got bored the other day and busted out the packet sniffer to see what it's actually doing when sending/receiving data to the Alexa servers, and it doesn't have a checksum (like the Google toolbar uses for getting PageRank). It does have a cookie which seems to be embedded, but it the lack of the cookie doesn't prevent you from getting data, which you can see by clicking here (you will need to view the source since it's XML... unless of course your browser supports XML natively).

And to answer the question on a lot of your minds, no... you can't spoof Alexa traffic by simply pulling the URL (I tested it already). Maybe it's the missing cookie data or something... and I'm sure if someone wanted to do it badly enough they could figure out how to, but I didn't really care about that part of it... I was mostly just curious about how it worked.