DMOZ and Google

[betcat]

My clients website and one of its main competitors websites are both listed in DMOZ but under different catergories. The competitors website is an editors choice in DMOZ and my clients is not!

When searching in Google.com under a certain keyphrase the competitors site is listed as a directory listing in the number 3 postion and my clients site is a directory listing at number 4.

My question is:
Is there any way that we could get our clients site listed above their competitors site in the listings returned from the Google directory when searching with this particular key phrase?

And also, does anyone know what criteria Google and DMOZ use to decide upon the order of listings?

Both sites have PR7 by the way!

Thanks for any help!

[vitaplease]

DMOZ lists alphabetically

Google Directory lists by Pagerank:

[webmasterworld.com...]

However the search function DMOZ is quite unclear. Anyone?

Google's directory search algo IMO seems to be a mix of the regular Google websearch, and some unknown added weighting from directory listings.

I also would be interested if anyone can shed some light on the way Google directory ranks search results.

[edited by: vitaplease at 12:50 pm (utc) on Mar. 28, 2003]

[takagi]

The default order in Google directory is the pagerank. But you can click on "View in alphabetical order".

Pagerank on the toolbar is just a whole number in the range from 0 to 10. If you both have PR7, it is possible that you have 7.15 and they have 7.32 what makes them show higher on the list.

<added>I should say, "show higher on the list in the same catergory". But you already wrote the sites are in different catergories. So I'm not sure whose PR is higher. </added>

[edited by: takagi at 12:58 pm (utc) on Mar. 28, 2003]

[Dynamoo]

Hi Betcat,

By "editor's choice" I guess you mean something designated as a "Cool Site". This will have no impact at all on Google results, it's something that you'd generally only see if you were at dmoz.org looking through the listings.

IMO, the ODP description makes very little difference, if any, to the Google search results. Google uses the directory description to help describe what that site is about.

For example, there is exactly one site in the ODP with my real name in the description. Type it into the search box at dmoz.org and my name is the only result. Type it into Google, and it comes up at number 40, which is where you'd expect for the content.

The ODP description DOES come up as an additional result, really only as extra information as to the content of the site.

My guess is that you've got a straight Google optimisation issue, nothing really to do with the ODP at all.

[webdiversity]

However the search function DMOZ is quite unclear. Anyone?

9 times out of 10 that we use the search function on ODP it says the service is too busy.

[Dynamoo]

The dmoz.org domain only accounts for 0.3% of my traffic, and I suspect it's similar for most other people. I think it's search results are really only of academic interest.

[betcat]

Does anyone know if/how i could find out the exact PR of our clients site as mentioned by takagi?

And also - the number 1 directory listing returned when searching on Google.com web search for this key phrase is PR7 and the number 2 directory listing is PR8 - could this be due to the fact that the number 1 listing is a well know football team and therefore bound to be a popular website! (a wild guess there!)

By editors choice in DMOZ i mean that the first 3 directory listings returned in Google web search for this key phrase are all marked as Editors Choices in DMOZ. Editors choices are always placed at the very top of the results within their category in DMOZ and the rest of the sites are listed alphabetically. Just thought that that might have some bearing on the Google directory listings returned in a web search on Google. Suppose it could just be a coincidence!

Thanks for all of your help on this.

[John_Caius]

A site designated as a Cool Site at dmoz is likely to be so because it's a very content-rich or authoritative site. Unsurprising therefore that it should also come high up in the Google results for a particular search. But the Cool Site status doesn't actually affect where it comes.

The dmoz search function is designed to pick out categories, not sites. So if you search for asthma, the first category listing will be Health/Conditions_and_Diseases/Respiratory_Conditions/Asthma and the first site listing will be one from that category. It's virtually exclusively used by editors so I wouldn't worry at all about where you or your competitors come in its results.

PR is only one of very many factors affecting which sites come out top in a Google search. For any particular keyword search, the most important factors are likely to be text in incoming links to the page, title text and H1 text. Otherwise Google (PR 10 or 11) would come out number one for any search, wouldn't it?

[takagi]

> if/how i could find out the exact PR
If you follow the link on msg2 posted by vitaplease, you can find a link to a page called "The Handy Dandy Google Page Rank Figurin' Guide" made by Chris Raimondi. After reading this, you can determine for pages in Google Directory if a page with toolbar PR5 is a high PR5 or a low PR5. For a toolbar PR7, there is no extra information availble because the width of the green bar in Google Directory is always 27 pixels. Nobody (well, except for some people at Google) knows the exact PR of a page.

[cornwall]

>>A site designated as a Cool Site at dmoz is likely to be so because it's a very content-rich or authoritative site.

Or... because the editor is corrupt. I have this theory that cool sites are only continued to be used by DMOZ because it enables metas to pick out dodgey editors

It seems that corrupt editors find it hard not to "cool" their own sites, and even if they are trying to hide an affiliation with the site, still are daft enough to cool it.

If the cooled site is not "head and shoulders" above othe sites in the category, then look for editor abuse! Its a dead giveaway.

[rfgdxm1]

>Or... because the editor is corrupt. I have this theory that cool sites are only continued to be used by DMOZ because it enables metas to pick out dodgey editors

Interesting theory. ;) Although, this will weed out only the editors who are both corrupt and stupid. As numerous people have posted, the actual traffic that they get from dmoz.org (which is the only place cooled sites are visible) is so small that the possible benefit for an editor to cool his own site makes it not worth the risk.

[cornwall]

>>possible benefit for an editor to cool his own site makes it not worth the risk.

There is a list somewhere of editors dismissed for cooling their own sites - it's longer than you would think.

Presumably there are more corrupt stupid editors around than you or I would imagine!

[ettore]

>> there are more corrupt stupid editors around than you or I would imagine

Which makes our job sometimes easier :)

[cornwall]

>>Which makes our job sometimes easier

Like I say, that's the reason you continue with "cool sites" :)

If readers want a smile try reading the guidelines on cooling [yklaw.net]

[g1smd]

When I tried that page, Mozilla prompted me to download a file of Chinese fonts!

Must be something to do with the:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=gb2312">
in the header of that file.

Must report that as a bug, when the internal fora are back online.

[rfgdxm1]

I suspect that typically corrupt ODP editors tend to be not to bright. If they were smart, then they'd realize that being a corrupt ODP editor isn't a very effective technique to do well on the web. ODP listings just aren't that important to do well on search engines. And, what it would take for a corrupt editor to do to score well on the search engines would very likely arouse attention. For example, if the editor adds his own site to a lot of inappropriate categories, some other editor is likely to spot this. A quick search for all other instances where this domain was listed in the ODP, if it turned up a lot, should immediately set off alarm bells. Wouldn't even take a meta to spot this. Any editor who finds suspicious listings can check on this. Or, for that matter even the public. It wouldn't make much sense to be a corrupt editor unless s/he was involved with commercial sites. Competitors could also figure this out, and would of course blow the whistle.

[takagi]

> Must report that as a bug, when the internal fora are back online.

The page linked to by cornwall belongs to the 'DMOZ Documentation Project'. On the About [inelegant.org] page of the project it says:

DMOZ Documentation Project (DDP) is intended to be a comprehensive collection of tutorials, how-to's, and resources to help editors at the Open Directory Project (ODP). It is entirely unofficial.

A Chinese ODP editor (according to his profile [dmoz.org] a Meta-editor) put it on his site and translated parts of it into Chinese. That explains the line:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=gb2312">
on this page.

You can also find a complete English [inelegant.org] and French [dmozed.org] version of DDP on Internet. And these two have 'charset=ISO-8859-1' in the header.

[yklaw]

Yep. That's it.

I translated parts of it, but due to time pressures and other issues never managed to complete that project. A script was used to convert all pages to be in Simp Chi encoding, but I've never done much on it since.

[g1smd]

I was in multiple fora at the time, with many windows and tabs open. I followed the link, and was asked to download a 4MB Chinese fonts file.

I looked back later, and felt sure that the link I followed was to dirt03.netscape.com - maybe I just imagined it, or clicked the wrong window - that is why i was going to report it as a bug. If it is on yklaws server, then that isn't a bug or problem.

Ah, I was also in a thread about DMOZ attribution. Hmm, I think that page is on rdf.dmoz.org or was it on dirt03.netscape.com instead?

Just completely confused now.

[cornwall]

>> If it is on yklaws server, then that isn't a bug or problem.

I gave that reference as the dmoz public server was (and still right now continues to be) down and there was little point in giving a reference there

[motsa]

If the cooled site is not "head and shoulders" above othe sites in the category, then look for editor abuse! Its a dead giveaway.

Actually, a "cooled" site should be either the most definitive site in the category or the official site for the category. As well, sometimes new editors do just make mistakes or a site has changed since it was cooled. So, it's possible that you'll come across non-definitive "cooled" sites that are not the result of editor abuse.

[motsa]

FYI: The corresponding link to the actual English-language version of the Dmoz Documentation Project would be [inelegant.org...] .