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This bugs me. They had an article against the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday for crying out loud. But short of removing my site from DMOZ, which I don't want to do, is there any way of getting them not to link to me?
Does this kind of thing bother anyone else? That the Dmoz data is being used to generate all these links we don't know about? I mean, normally I'd be like 'yay free PR', but this time its a little creepy.
But then I'm evil like that.
I was snooping around in my "Backward Links"
Some of the dmoz-clones are very weird, but since they hardly generate any traffic it doesn't bother me.
Of course, if you were flooded by referrals from this site you could make a JavaScript - like Evil Dynamoo - but why not simply add a few statements giving your opinion about "really conservative" people?
Remember that they may be "leeching" from dmoz.org as pages are requested, rather than copying the whole thing. And even if they copy the ODP data, they may not be set up to change it -- since they'd have to devise some way to keep their changes and re-publish them after the next ODP download.
I only know of two sites that ever picked up the ODP and published it with additions -- website promotions was their business, and they spent a lot of time and money setting up things so that they could accept paid listings.
I know the feeling. My first and "home" category is Christianity/Music/Hymns, and at least one porn site copied all the editors' profiles (including mine) for search engine keyword fodder. So a net search for me finds that porn site. :( Other editors feel even more violated, since the porn site shows up high on the first page of Google results for them -- at least it's below the second page for me.
But I'm not sure I completely sympathize. If you represent your side of the issue -- whatever issue -- well, then you're winning influence over the other side's partisans and would-be partisans. And that's a good thing, isn't it?
No, there is probably no way.
Yes, there is a way. But you have to think out of the box. The issue whether a directory has a legal permission to link to a web site is really one of the most fundamental mechanisms of a directory, and it should be addressed using a robust and secure mechanism which prevents the type of problems mentioned in this thread.
The legal aspects of web page linking will probably become more and more important in the future as the importance of the web grows, and the seo and marketing tactics become increasingly aggressive.
How can it be done? One possible way is to utilize a meta tag in the web page to indicate the legal permission for a directory to show a link to the web page. No meta tag, no legal permission.
If you dont want someone coming to your site from this other site you can do as one suggested to handle the traffic from that site. Not much you can do sorry to say. You can ask them to remove it but chances are they wont, or if they download the newest RDF they gotcha again.
Try with the E-Mail to them first to see if it can be removed. hahah but i wouldnt say 'i hate your site remove my link' that will cause someone to chuckle... say something like you're changing hosts or taking down the site and you wanted to ensure that they didnt have broken links so if they could remove the link to your site which is located '/cat/egory/path' type thing may work.
This strikes me as some sort of flame-baiting, no? If the opposite was posted: "ultra-liberal site using ODP links to me" - wouldn't that upset you, Emma? Are you trying to stir something up?
(The "Backward Links" weren't Googles, they were Alexas, should have clarified). Anyway, it's just odd cause I have other quality links that could be listed there instead. I'm not sure how Alexa ranks linkbacks, but it doesn't seem like a good system.
It's not really a big deal, it just startled me. And I wonder like Go2 about the eventual legal ramifications of this kind of situation.
Webdevsf: No I wasn't trying to stir things up, altho you seem upset. I guess I should have said "Site with unwelcome content linking to me". The point is not what the site's content is, but that I don't want it to be associated with me.
If you wish the right to choose whom you'll support, you give up the right to choose your supporters. It's that simple, and web links aren't that different.
The "meta" tag approach is even less relevant: just as using robots.txt to block search engines is. The fact is, it's not about your site, and YOUR meta tags are about ONLY your site. It's about the text someone else wants to put on THEIR site, and information about it on yet a third site.
There is a "technological" approach: if you don't want people COMING TO your site from anywhere, then you can check the REFERER tag, and block links from that site. (This is a big issue with the big-money lawyers, the big-money commercial sites don't want people seeing anything useful without being funnelled past the expensive advertisements, and obviously it is one of the few internet concerns that really can be understood, let alone reported, by the ad-supported news organizations.)
But you say that isn't the issue, because you don't expect anyone to actually use that site to get to yours. But I'll ask you another thing: how many people do you think will investigate YOUR associations by looking at Alexa to see who links to you? I'd bet you are the only person who ever did that, and unless you hire a professional SERP perp, probably the only person who ever will.
