dmoz and newhoo - don't really understand the difference

[Trisha]

I was under the impression that newhoo was the original name of ODP. I have heard people mention newhoo but that was all I knew about it. Recently I got a site listed in ODP and now with the recent backlinks update in Google I see newhoo listed as a backlink for that site, but not dmoz.

I guess this is more of a Google question, but does it usually only count the dmoz or the newhoo link and not both? The dmoz page my site is linked from has a much higher PR than the newhoo site. Please don't think I'm really complaining though - I'm thrilled to death to get the ODP link and even more happy the site is now showing some PR, I had been worried that the site had been penalized or something as it had been a PR0 for a really long time. I would have been even more happy if Google was counting the higher PR page though.

[RFranzen]

There is no difference; www.gnuhoo.org is a DNS equivalent name to dmoz.org ; they resolve to the same tcp/ip address. Netscape acquired the "gnuhoo.org" domain along with its listings. They kept the original URL active to support websites which had linked to gnuhoo.

-- Rich

[rmjvol]

From an August 2003 thread here [webmasterworld.com], GoogleGuy said:

steveb, I didn't realize that you were talking about a link: query. Having newhoo.com showing up in backlinks wouldn't affect things. I'll ask tomorrow someone tomorrow to make sure, but that wouldn't affect PageRank/rankings/traffic/etc.

I couldn't find where GG confirms this after "asking someone tomorrow" so I'll assume GG confirmed it & didn't need to clarify his/her answer.

rmjvol

[choster]

Very odd! Googling link:newhoo.com turns up 381,000 results, even though it is now just a mirror:

gnuhoo.com = newhoo.com = directory.mozilla.org = dmoz.org

I guess Google's crawler finding those alternative urls from extremely old sites that linked to the directory prior to the late 1998/early 1999 name changes, and haven't been updated since.

[Trisha]

so newhoo and gnuhoo are both basically the same as dmoz.org then?

Thanks for the link rmjvol. I read through that thread but didn't see where GoogleGuy ever responded back again. What steveb was saying is exactly right though. In my case the dmoz page has a PR of 7 and the corresponding newhoo page only has PR of 4, so my index page got a 3. I have a number of other links through exchanges made a long time ago, but they have never showed up as backlinks, presumably because they have a really low PR. So the newhoo one is the only one making a significant contribution to the sites PR.

[g1smd]

Hmm, Google should realise by now that these sites are all really the exact same site.

GoogleGuy hinted last week that they take a guess that two sites are really the same site, and update that data every few months.

I wonder why these are still showing as separate items several years later?