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Let's call it Red Widget History. Under that, Zeal has subcats for 19 century, 20th century, important people, relevant eras, and major legislation/court cases. Each subcat has more subcats and the individual pages submitted at those lower levels are definitely deep-linked.
DMOZ has a Red Widget History category with half a dozen of the most prominent people getting their own subcats and one or two eras getting subcats.
In this case Zeal provides the more complete directory -- a better service to end users. DMOZ isn't going to get as many entries here as long as it discourages deep linking. No one will devote an entire site to Joe Schmo, Tanzanian legislator and champion of the Red Widget cause.
So now the question. Why does DMOZ discourage deep linking? Doesn't deep linking usually (at least for information sites) result in a more complete directory and better value to the end user?
That other directory has more paid stuff, thus, it can afford to be more comprehensive, after a fashion.
DMOZ doesn't have any paid editors, afaik.
You are 100% correct, though, deep linking can add a LOT of value to the users experience when using a directory. If a site is pertinent to many topics, it can be expected to be added to multiple categories, in time...
Though as you might have seen here, there are often enough differences in opinion of the volunteer staff of DMOZ on how things should be done. Then again, as far as I've seen, the same happens in *every* directory on the net.
An editor can add a deep link if there is a good body of content to be found there. I think it makes sense for deep links to be the exception, though.
Exceptions to this rule are ideally rich sources of information deep within a big site that are not simple to access from the front page. A good example is the neurology chapter of an online health textbook being listed in the neurology category. If the URL is www.domain.com/page1 and page1 is a big red link on the homepage then it's generally not listed.
This also comes into play for non-English sites with a translated English version, often submitted to Regional/Country as e.g. www.domain.com/english.htm. If there's a big Union Jack/Stars & Stripes on the homepage then the URL should get listed as www.domain.com, even if the front page itself is not in English.
The guidelines (dmoz.org/guidelines) state:
In the vast majority of categories and branches, deeplinking is the exception rather than the rule. Deeplinks should offer content that is unique and extremely useful to a particular category. There are no strict rules regarding the type of site that should or should not be deeplinked. Providing deeplinks, in a uniform way, to sites that offer extremely useful and unique content can add value to the directory in a few cases (e.g. categories with very limited content, and where the meat of the available web content is typically buried within larger sites).
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So the other common scenario is in a really niche category, e.g. a really rare disease, for which there are very few dedicated websites but plenty of information in subsections of larger sites. The SARS category discussed here recently is a good example - plenty of links from places like the WHO, CDC, news sites etc.
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The short answer is that dmoz lists sites not pages.
Doesn't that decrease the usefullness to the end user, though? If I am trying to research Millard Fillmore and instead of having a category of deep-linked stuff on him, I have to try the various sites listed under US Presidents ... or maybe the sites under US History. And at that broad level, the descriptions won't make mention of President Fillmore. It makes for very non-specific search results for specific searches.
Is this really by design? Is this really valuable ... except for getting some Google PR from a link to the home page?
ch.dmoz.org/Society/History/By_Region/North_America/United_States/Presidents/Fillmore,_Millard/
If you look at the sites listed here, several are deeplinks of very large sites such as the White House, many of the rest are subsections of personal sites but with useful information on the topic.
Well Millard Fillmore is an excellent example of both the 'subsection of a large site' and the 'obscure topic' (no offence to MF) type of deeplink:
OK, if deep-linking in those cases is acceptable, then there's some work that can be done in the section in which I'm interested. It's as non-commercial as the Millard Fillmore example and a little more obscure. I think I'll apply to become an editor once I finish reading the guidlines.
This is because, to echo John_Caius's post, what makes a "site" distinct from a "page" in reference/research categories depends on the relative amount, usefulness, and uniqueness of topical content available across the known Internet.
Preferably, however, the category editor would be the one either to identify some submission as an outstanding resource, and proactively add or submit deeplinks into appropriate categories, or to come across the deeplink through other means, such as a link from another listing or from a Copernic or Google search. We already have trouble with all the superfluous "my poem about butterflies" submissions in every subcategory of Science/Lepidoptera. Imagine if every submitter were encouraged to submit every url containing "useful and unique content"-- in his opinion :).
But somebody lookign for restaurants in my country is not going to go to:
Regional > Country > Directories
they'll go to
Regional > Country > Restaurants
where there might be 2 or 3 listed... while if the'd deep link to www.mysite.com/cat/restaurants they'd find almost 70% of all the restaurants of my country jsut one click away.
In fact, by beeign stuck in the Directories category I'm VERY unlikely to EVER recieve any decent traffik form DMOZ, except for perhaps researchers and students... and my competitors...
SN
37,743 sites have 5 or more listings
Although that is only around 1% of all sites listed, it illustrates how prevalent deep linking is.
Likewise, dmoz would rapidly become a mess if they started handing out 5, 10, 20 links to every site that had as many pages.
Does anyone get any significant traffic directly from dmoz listings or search results? One site we work with gets up to 60 referrals per month from ODP but that's about the max.
Fine in theory, wouldn't work in practice :(
Simply because DMOZ do not have enough editors to do that!
Simply because DMOZ do not have enough editors to do that
Actually, that's probably one of the fastest way an editor could build up a category. Find a another diectory or links page with good stuff, ID the sites, write titles and descriptions and save lots of time searching and messing around with errant submissions.
SN
