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I chose to regard ODP and its many clones as one family. After all they are built on one database. And that family now actually sends me more visitors than Jubii. Only Google are bigger.
And the progress seems to continue. More and more websites set up directories that are built on ODP. And those directories are used by people who might never have found their way to ODP.
I have a number of websites that for one reason or another have never been submitted to ODP. In the next couple of weeks I intend to take a look at all those websites and then try to bring them into such a condition that it is relevant to submit them.
During the last couple of years I have developed the habit of regarding search engines as MUCH more important for my websites than web directories. I believe that it is now time for a change in this attitude.
I still primarily try to build websites that give good content to human visitors and present that content in a reasonably user friendly way. Secondarily I make some minor tweaks that are targetted at googlebot and at Google's algorithm.
From now on my third priority will be to make websites "ODP-friendly".
I think that the amount of ODP-directed traffic a site receives depends heavily on the nature of the site--some topics lend themselves to directory searches more than others, and some types of searchers use directories more than others. So I wouldn't be surprised to see one site with an ODP listing getting quite a lot of traffic from it, and another getting very little.
Almost but not quite. In my own judgement some of my smallest websites do not merit a place in ODP, but they fit fine into the general structure that my websites build.
And you are no doubt very well aware of these two facts:
1. For some websites it may be difficult to decide a category.
2. Web directories sometimes have extremely different category structures.
Some of my websites do not fit very well into ODP's category structure.
> I think that the amount of ODP-directed traffic a site receives depends heavily on the nature of the site.
No doubt. But for my own sites I am seing a general tendency that there are more and more ODP clones sending me traffic and they seem to be doing it consistently. I tend to believe that this may be a genuinely new source of traffic.
When Yahoo and other directories developed portalitis (an illness that most likely never will hit ODP!) their usefullness as directories dropped dramatically. Perhaps all those new ODP clones fill the void that were made by old directories going portal?
Languages which are widely spoken as a first or second tongue (e.g. French, English, Chinese, Spanish) and/or whose populations are relatively wealthy and technologically advanced (e.g. Japanese, Korean, the Nordic languages) naturally have more search options.
Denmark is rich and advanced, but Danish has far fewer speakers than French for instance, so I imagine the Yahoos of the world assigned yahoo.dk a lower priority than, say, yahoo.fr, meaning in turn a later launch and possibly fewer resources. This means they are not as entrenched as in the US market, and users less loyal.
Related to this, the total number of players in the market is smaller. There are of course native language sites like Jubii or Daum. But of the major English directories, Yahoo offers a dozen languages, Skaffe offers three, LS/Z and JoeAnt only one. In such cases, the dmoz.org/World category-- with 73 languages (really, just 69 plus Esperanto, Interlingua, and Latin, and two different alphabets for Chinese)-- is naturally more visible and important than it is in the Anglophone, Francophone, or Sinophone world.
It doesn't hurt that World/ editors often bring a great deal of national or linguistic pride and motivation to build up their languages, implying higher quality listings.
At the far end of the scale, there may be very few websites at all and the ODP category may be the only general directory available in any language. dmoz.org/World/ includes some small languages, and some of the language branches under development in dmoz.org/Test/World/ are outright obscure.
Post Florida, many odp cats are ranking very high. User clicks through to the cat from a Google serp then finds you. Could be one reason you are seeing increased traffic from them.
I suspect that it also has a lot to do with how well a site ranks in the SERPs on major SEs for the most obvious keywords that people tend to use. If your site is about widget repair, and #1 on Google for "widget repair", likely people will find it first with Google. However, if your site for whatever reason is #67 on Google, yet one of 5 different sites in the ODP "widget repair" category, people will find it easier in the ODP.
