How important is DMOZ when indexed by SE's other than google?

[gingaaar]

Ok, Does anyone know...honestly...

How important is DMOZ exactly when being indexed by SE other than google.

ie. altavista, lycos, hotbot.

Gingaaar

[Brett_Tabke]

Other se's do use the ODP database as a sort of QA system. There are also thousands of people that dl the rdf dump for various reasons. When other se's startup, the ODP rdf dump is what seeds their database.

[jatar_k]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld gingaaar,

Brett's got the answer, I just have a welcome :)

[mosley700]

gingaaar
Welcome to the forum. :)
That's a good question. We know Google likes DMOZ, but recently I'm thinking Ink is putting more weight on DMOZ than previously.
As for AV, I don't see them putting any weight on DMOZ. I've had sites in Google with PR7, and in DMOZ, and AV still wouldn't include the sites after several months.

[rfgdxm1]

GoogleGuy has said himself that for Google an ODP link has no more value than any other link on a page with the same PR. As for Altavista, I just checked some SERPs that I figured would show certain site ranking high if they gave extra weight to an ODP listing. No evidence that they are. If Ink does put extra weight on ODP listings, to me it doesn't look by much.

[startup]

I don't know of one SE that does not use Dmoz data.
Who can name an SE that doesn't use the Dmoz data?

[Laisha]

Who can name an SE that doesn't use the Dmoz data?

I can:

Fast
MSN
AltaVista
Teoma
Lycos

Just to name some of the majors.

[startup]

Laisha,
I can find Dmoz data in;
-Fast
-Av
-Teoma

MSN uses Ink and Looksmart, Looksmart claims to be partnered with Ink and Ink uses Dmoz data. Is MSN an SE? Hmmm?
Lycos.ca uses Google and most of the others use Fast.

[cornwall]

I agree with Startup, I can find DMOZ data in Fast.

Checking against source in the coding and against Dmoz descriptions, there certainly appear to be pure Dmoz entries in Fast

[TheDoctor]

Newbie question: what's DMOZ? and ODP?

[Marcia]

Open Directory Project, manned by volunteer editors.

[dmoz.org...]

[caine]

Hi Doctor,

DMOZ/ODP are the same beast, the ODP is the Open Directory Project, which is hosted at www.dmoz.org / with mirrors on various regionals (TLDs).

It is owned by AOL Time Warner, though Netscape Division is the Daddy of the ODP. The ODP certainly has been, if not still classed as one of the most valuable free directories on the net, with each of its listings hand edited by approx 4,500 active editors. The odp directory structure is leading the structure of categorisation of website content on the net. Google's own directory is a map of the ODP's which supports G's serps, many of the big search engines use it as primary or secondary RDF feed to their SERP's. Plus many vortals and portals use aspects of it, pertaining to their particular scope - thousands of them in one shape or another.

Worth getting a listing on the ODP (the higher, and more content specific the cat to your site the better). Personally i consider it the most important of all directories, though some would argue that Yahoo is still the king.

[Laisha]

Ah, startup. I misunderstood the question. I thought you were asking about who doesn't use it as their directory.

Perhaps I need to ramp up my coffee usage! :)

[skibum]

I don't think this is likely to change any time soon once there simply isn't any other massive set of organized data that the engines could use as a reality check (is there?).

[WebManager]

Qu: Who can name SEs that don't use DMOZ data?

A previous response to this thread was:

"I can

Fast
MSN
AltaVista
Teoma
Lycos"

And what do all these SEs have in common?

Ans: They could disappear overnight without making a dent in INet SE traffic.

[rfgdxm1]

Incorrect WebManager. The amount of traffic I get from MSN is definitely material, and AskJeeves is at least on the radar. Google doesn't have 100% of the market.

Hmm...I just checked my stats. 11 hits from MSN in the last 6 hours. 150 unique vistors a day to that site is a rather good day. MSN is nothing to sneeze at. NOTE: This site is in Looksmart via Zeal, and this likely is material. This site also has rather excellent Google SERPs, so that isn't a factor.

[rfgdxm1]

For anyone wanting some actual stats, these are from my main site:

Links from an Internet Search Engine - Full list
- Google 1798
- Yahoo 628
- MSN 398
- AOL 79
- AltaVista 45
- Netscape 45
- Other search engines 42
- Dogpile 27
- Lycos 21
- Excite 20
- Overture 19
- MetaCrawler (Metamoteur) 14
- Hotbot 10
- AllTheWeb 10
- DMOZ 9
- Looksmart 7
- Google (Images) 6
- WebCrawler 6
- InfoSpace 2
- Mamma 2
- Teoma 1
- Evreka 1

This is from the web host analyzer software this month. I've gotta figure most of those "Other search engines" is AskJeeves, because it is conspicuously absent from this list. My site is a reasonably good one for this analysis because it so happens that the main search terms people will use for it are not very competetive. Thus, with SEO I have it doing well on pretty much all the searach engines. It should be noted that my sites users tend to skew young, and are very "proletarian". As such, stats for a site that target the computer geek types or such may be much different. What I consider most notable about these stats: look how high MSN is. Don't give me any baloney hardly anyone uses MSN.

Addition: just spotted this in the logs:

[ask.com...] 110

The software didn't recognize ask.com as a search engine. That's 110 hits from ask.com this month.

[caine]

I know i would be concerned in the amount of loss of sales if MSN, FAST/LYCOS dissappeared over night.

[rfgdxm1]

If you look at my logs, I'm getting all of 2 hits a day from FAST/LYCOS, and I just checked and I have excellent SERPs there. I get twice as many hits from Altavista. However, if you look at those numbers above there is just no way I can consider MSN traffic unsignificant. Sure, it is nowhere near Google/Yahoo/AOL, but still material.

One comment: I grossly underestimated my site's traffic previously. At the moment it looks like I am getting around 300 unique visitors a day on this one site from just the search engines?! This would explain why bandwidth for the site is way up...

Also, for another sample, here is the results from my other site. Again, MSN is quite strong.

- Google 642
- Yahoo 331
- MSN 254
- AOL 40
- Netscape 22
- Other search engines 12
- Overture 7
- Hotbot 7
- MetaCrawler (Metamoteur) 7
- Excite 6
- DMOZ 6
- Lycos 5
- Looksmart 4
- Dogpile 3
- AltaVista 3
- Teoma 2
- Go.com 1
- Go2Net (Metamoteur) 1
- AllTheWeb 1
- WebCrawler 1

[stechert]

[aboutus.looksmart.com...] ("What is Looksmart?")
[zeal.com...] ("What is Zeal?")
[zeal.com...] ("Contributions to Zeal are seen by millions of users")
[zeal.com...] ("How long does it...")

[WindSun]

For us MSN is 4th. Far behind Google but still very significant - around 9% of hits.

[quotations]

On 27 of my main sites, Google is over 80% of the traffic.

I have one newer site which so far is over 60% from MSN.

It may be that traffic from Google will increase on that one after the next couple of Google updates but only time will tell.