The Death of Dmoz?

I am quite sure that every SEO beginner is be told from the outset that the DMOZ Open Directory Project is a must for inclusion. Get your site listed within it, they are told. A number of SEO optimisation programs have checks for the inclusion of your site into the directory too. Aside from a decent link building campaign, the DMOZ inclusion appears to be a good thing.

However, since becoming involved in seo topics, I have witnessed somewhat of an under current of annoyance toward DMOZ. Yes, generally these are from site owners or web masters that have failed inclusion. It appears, that the most popular reasons for not being listed after submission to one of the categories, is that the site content is not up to the quality required. Or the site was submitted to a wrong category editor. That`s fair enough reason.

I have researched a few disgruntled comments regarding the lack of transparency of DMOZ. It does appear that some comments have some weight in the argument.

In referencing URLs that have not been included in the directory, against URLs that are, I have found that the quality of the submitted site does tend to be as good or better than current entries. So why aren't they included?

Another wild accusation is that the category editors could be somewhat associated to the business category they edit. Personally, I do not hold much credence with this argument. Okay, if it were true, that might affect one or two different categories, but not the whole directory.

Another major bugbear seems to be with DMOZ submission itself. For some time the submission response has been "We apologize for the inconvenience while we resolve technical problems. Please check back in a day or two."

Technical problems? Server problems,? Editorial problems?

This "day or two" has been an ongoing situation for many months. Is DMOZ dead?

Now, considering the importance of ODP Data. Everybody knows that the data is used for the Google directory and various other directories and Search. The benefit here is that you get a nice healthy pagerank link from the respected DMOZ and another from Google. Nice if you can get it. Obviously, there are other forms of backlinks that you can obtain in the long run, but that's not the discussion here.

The inclusion into the Dmoz directory plays gives some weight in the Google indexing algorithm too.

Moreover, I cannot see any contact links within DMOZ. I think I have good eyesight. Therefore, its not really transparent in its operation if you cannot even contact the directory for comment.

We appear to be in a post DMOZ era. The haves and the have nots. What really baffles me is why does a creditable company like Google take the data from such a skewed way of operating? If the data isn't consistent, then is it of use?

Anybody can design and host a website and publish content. Sooner or later a search engine will apply its algorithm to the pages and work out its value to the Internet. This is a process fair, equitable process, applied equally to all sites. I think the Internet must move on from patchy data such as DMOZ, especially companies like Google.

DMOZ says "Humans do it better". I don't think so.

Chris Longley (SEO Blog)

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