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I've searched through various threads about this, but couldn't find anything recent about it. If our sites can't get into DMOZ are they always going to be in trouble with Google, or can we overcome it through more quality links in?
I never had a problem getting into DMOZ a few years ago, but now when I try, I notice that my sites aren't getting included, and when I inquire at the DMOZ forum, they say that you can have one site in DMOZ, and if you want your other sites in as well, then you should link from the one included site to the others (even if they have completely unique and useful content, and are on different topics). I'm not trying to submit any duplicate content sites, it's all unique, and definitely not spamming.
Anyway, the main question is whether I can do well in Google SERPS even without DMOZ?
Take for example the PR issue. How many sites do you know that have a PR10 in the home page? On top of that, how many PR10 sites that accept site listing.
I know Yahoo does and I know Yahoo realizes too that people are willing to pay premium just for the listing and not for the traffic.
Why? Because of the PR impact and higher PR equates to higher listing, all other things considered equal.
So, if a category in ODP have a PR4 or higher, wouldn't it beneficial for your site to be listed in ODP?
What is ODP by the way, is it not Open Directory Project and not a personal hobby site/category project?
Sure, you can play golf too all you want but does it mean that you won't let your competition play with you?
Let's say I'm an editor on a PR8 category and I have my site listed in that category and because of it my site is enjoying the PR boost from such link.
On the other hand, I would be attracting a lot of my competition who would like to join in my 'hobby world'.
But first, I'll check Google for my prime keywords. Hey wait that site is on top of me and that other site is just a few position below me.
If I add them to my ODP list that would give them a boost too. Hmmm...
Oh wait, I just saw a competitor in my list and is ahead of me at Google serp...how did it get in there? Better delist it...serve him right :)
I'm the judge, jury, and executioneer for this particular list....ha ha ha...no wait, better still, I'm God nobody can appeal my decision.
- ODP is a seed directory for googlebot. If you are in ODP you *will* get crawled. And you will probably get crawled earlier and deeper.
- DMOZ and Google Directory pages tend to come up in the SERPs a lot, and it sure is nice to have your link in there is a surfer clicks on those links.
- ODP is viral in that there are lots of copies out there. I know of at least 4 that show up as backlinks at some times.
- When building a set of useful links for their sites, webmasters might go to a convenient list (like DMOZ or Yahoo) to build that list.
Google doesn't have to give them any sort of extra consideration for them to be more worthwhile than your average link.
(please note: 'on the whole' before rants commence)
As such, it shouldn't be too surprising that many well ranking sites are also in DMOZ - Ranking by effect rather than cause.
If you suspect editor abuse, please do report it by the proper channels, but I'll be honest with you: in the vast majority of all complaints, it's really just that there's a huge, extremely spam-riddled submission queue in a category no one feels strongly motivated to wade through, and so progress there is much slower than the submitter would like, and that's all that's actually going on. My humble point is that if the category you're looking at is in that kind of a situation, then the listing won't do very much for you once you do eventually get it. Honestly, what benefit do you think a link to your site from that Web Designers/N category I mentioned earlier would bring you? I can't imagine the sad irony behind some desperate webmaster who actually spent the thousands of hours it would take to progress through the ODP far enough to manage that category so as to list his own site there and not list any of his competitors, when some other editor was just as likely to list the competitors there as they were before anyway, and when the PR boost in question is probably less than one single link exchange with a related business could have brought, and when the category page itself is not one many users ever look at. Anyone foolish enough to pursue that path would almost deserve the crushing waste of his time he brought down on his own head...
Hmmm...either I miss something but as far as I know I have better chance winning the lotto than getting to be a dmoz editor.
So the answer is that you haven't tried.
Seriously, though, Google covers billions of web pages. They have to grad on to whatever they can in determining a ranking. DMOZ is a quality directory, the largest Internet directory. The sites have been reviewed by editors. It only makes sense that Google should use inclusion in the directory as a mark of worthiness.
If you ask me, Google doesn't give DMOZ listings enough weight.
If you ask me, Google doesn't give DMOZ listings enough weight.
I'll take the flamebait.
Google is an algorithmic engine. If they gave more weight to DMOZ, they'd be saying that they think DMOZ is a better gauge of quality than other sites on the Internet.
That assertion simply cannot be made.
On the one hand they say:
"It's all automated, we do it by algo"
On the other hand they say:
"Send in a spam report, and we'll pacify :) them"
Then on the other hand they state:
"We can't alter search results"
And then on a the other hand, they use a human edited directory, and one staffed by volunteers, to edge their results.
On an additional hand, they claim to be almost the guardians of 'search' and 'information', then domineer the web they claim to adore with their own targetted adverts.
The conclusion, ladies and gentlemen is perfectly clear, Google has er... five hands!
We then watched her category unravel, as someone took it upon themselves to remove a number of the entries she had added. Again, no logic, just some hidden agenda.
The lesson I learned is that there is a layer in the hierarchy who are unaccountable. As someone already stated above, a dictatorship. They have their own agenda, their own motives. From my experience these motives are not to build the highest quality directory possible.
Why do I recount this story? Because giving undue weight to something like this when it is clearly flawed will cause the search index being equally flawed. Building upon a corrupt system is bound to reduce the quality of the search results.
It is possible that Google has already realised this, as they have removed the directory from their own front page. If they haven't realised it, I sincerely hope they do soon.
A link from dmoz.org is just like a link from anywhere else. However, many sites don't have any decent links other than from dmoz.org, so that link to important to them even though Google doesn't give it extra weighting.
I still think that Brandy included something special with regard to ODP. Just prior to it I received an email from Google which did not appear to be a boiler plate stating "We are aware of the problem that you are
experiencing" and going on to say "Please be assured that we are actively working with the ODP to find a solution."
Brandy happenned, my main site went back to #1 for all of my target terms and even went to #1 on Google Directory when I clicked on the Directory tab after doing a Web search.
Two other sites I have which are not in the ODP dropped back from top 10 to #90 and beyond.
These things may be coincidences and I'm sure a lot more went on but counter to popular opinion I think that ODP is currently of some special importance.
Best wishes
Sid
OTOH who cares about my opinion ;o)
Anyway, I unfortunately don't see anything constructive I could possibly say about editor abuse. It does happen, sometimes; and people caught doing it are removed from the project. There's no winning for losing on this one--webmasters will always think we're not cracking down on abuse of our guidelines hard enough, and ex-editors and their beneficiaries will always think we're cracking down on it too hard.
I'm not a meta-editor, and so the only reassurance I can offer is that every single time I've seen a webmaster complain that his or her submission must have fallen victim to corruption, it was simply still waiting in a long queue. I do realize that's a frustrating answer to receive, but it's not actually _abuse_... just a question, as I've mentioned, of differing priorities. That and the fact that some of the unreviewed queues have a frighteningly low signal-noise ratio and only the bravest editors dare to open some of them at all. My computer wouldn't even be able to handle some of the larger queues, and I'd be surprised if one submission in 50 was listable in some areas. :-o The spam I receive even in my relatively out-of-the-way categories is unbelievable. I don't know what could possibly be going through somebody's mind to make them submit 30 different subpages of the same porno site to different subcategories of a completely unrelated Literature directory--they MUST know they're all going to be deleted--but they still keep trying, don't they? Haven't stopped getting mass-mailed spam in my guestbook, either. Some people will try anything if they think they might get a buck out of it, and it just winds up wasting a lot of people's time. )-:
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Disclaimer: This post constitutes an unofficial, personal opinion not necessarily shared by other ODP editors, the university, or my cats.
Zeberdee could be right 'power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely' or something like that. I don't think this threads about DMOZ but I can't help but notice that this old chestnut always comes up every time someone mentions DMOZ, myself I usually submit sites and if they get in its a bonus, not having a site in there does not mean it won't rank or reach the top spot only good SEO will do that and only good SEO will keep it there.
So, it *is* a link like any other, treated like any other. But that means the algorithm weighs the positives and negatives of having a link on this type of page. Obviously while a link is a link, a link from a romance novel directory page should in any algorithm be more helpful to ranking for romance novels than a link from a plumbing site. The company you keep, the company you are related to matters. Trash linkers might wake up to this some day, but maybe not.
The opposite of the repercussions that exist for being a part of a bad neighborhood also exists... it is a good thing to be a part of a good neighborhood. Sure, nobody will say Dmoz is a perfect neighborhood, and some categories are far less useful than others, but on an Internet oozing with garbage, even "not awful" is actually pretty good.
a link from a romance novel directory page should in any algorithm be more helpful to ranking for romance novels than a link from a plumbing site
What if the romance novels are about beautiful women falling for plumbers? Or what if they meet and fall in love while on a plumbing job?
Half joking, but actually half serious - this would be hard to determine algorithmically.
even "not awful" is actually pretty good
Its not that bad, I have a subset version on one of my sites :)
beautiful women falling for plumbers
If plenty of books were written about women falling for plumbers or maybe the plumber that fell for a beautiful female then applied semantics will come into play and hilltop will still play its part.
There are a lot less Google loving arrogant webmasters this month than there were last month. Don’t look for much sympathy when the filter hits you next. Thinking that you are somehow smarter than everyone who got hit by the filter is an incorrect assumption.
What GG says and what can be determined by a little reverse engineering and reviewing the top sites in the G results (1, 2 and 3 word 'money' phrases) is entirely two different things. So you go on believing in fairy tales if you like.
Do a search for a travel related one word phrase (not allowed to post specifics in the forum). Now lookup the base domain of the top 20 results. You will see that almost every single one is from the DMOZ and clustered in the top 20 results. You can do this same test in common two word phrases. Remember to only look for the root domain in DMOZ. For instance, if a page is returned in the form of [anything.com...] you would go to the DMOZ and lookup www.anything.com or anything.com (do not lookup the full link which includes the subs /gg/tells/whoppers.htm)
Do a search for a travel related one word phrase (not allowed to post specifics in the forum). Now lookup the base domain of the top 20 results. You will see that almost every single one is from the DMOZ and clustered in the top 20 results.
So what?
I would think that the top 20 results for most one-word search phrases would be in DMOZ. You'd need a timeline and historical data to prove what you're after.
do not lookup the full link
But you're ignoring the fact that Google ranks pages, not websites.
Um... you may have your cause and effect backwards here. Speaking as an editor, I'd have to be pretty incompetent not to have bothered to look in Google while searching out new sites for one of my categories. Obviously not all of the top 20 sites returned by a Google search will meet the ODP's standards, but unless it's a hideously bad SERP, most of them probably will.
It can also be completely correlational--I find a lot of sites to list because other sites I'm perusing link to them, and Google ranks sites with lots of links to them well.
I'm sure a DMOZ link is a positive thing, and for some categories it may even be very helpful, but there's no way it's necessary. I find new non-ODP-listed sites at the top of Google searches all the time. Then I list them, of course; but they had good Google rankings before I went near them. (-:
Wrong... Once the 'money word' filter kicks in for highly searched terms it is ALL ABOUT websites.
Highly accurate rule... Is it a 'money word' search? If yes check DMOZ. Is it in the DMOZ? If site/domain (abc.com) is in DMOZ THEN rank sub page by onpage factor. If no remove from top results. (more to filter, but these are the strongest rules - IMO)
Obviously, if there really WERE a rule like this, Geocities and Tripod affiliate pages would fill up the entire top 10000 results in all competitive search. So try a simple experiment. Pick a simple search -- any simple competitive search, and look at the results.
Then check the porosity of that tinfoil hat.
Which version of Google do you use? Do they have a non-filtered one that no one else can see? Because what you say is not correct.
Traffic wise, let's see some hands here that their site do receive substantial amount of traffic from ODP?
Then why do we want our site listed at ODP?
A competitive category where my site 'use' to be listed for ages have just gone through what the ODP called a 'culling process' and my site was delisted...reason being "it's an affiliate site and no unique content" they/he/she said.
a. I'm not sure the technical know-how of the editor who delisted the site. Could the editor mistook the dynamic URL /jump.cgi?123 as an affiliate link?
b. Is the editor blind that the site have an active forum of a few thousand members, a blog area for select members, even from time to time a real news section/update. How much unique content does a site require to pass ODP standard? lol
C. The site is very popular on its niche, perhaps one of the leader in that category.
d. Unless the editor have been hiding under a rock. How many sites now a day that is not involve on some form of affiliate program? Which by the way is the only way my site could support itself and continue to provide a necessary service to those who needs help.
Okay but that's not really got my goat...
When a category goes through a culling process...it means that 'every' listed site have gone through a re-review process.
Upon checking the list, guess what? My closest competitor is still there which has similar structure to my site minus the forum, blog, and news section and aggressively promoting some affiliate program.
And, even a framed free-hosted page showing another multiple listed site.
And, a few more doing similar to what I'm doing.
ODP or that editor/s consider them as having unique content. lol
When confronted with this discrepancy on their decision process, I got this one liner...
There is no appeal process
End of story, the editor/s are unquestionable and got away with murder.
Google result?
Loss some key position. And, that close competitor? Now is ahead of my site whereas before no matter what it does, it could only come close.
Coincidental Google change in ranking? I don't think so.
Highly accurate rule... Is it a 'money word' search? If yes check DMOZ. Is it in the DMOZ? If site/domain (abc.com) is in DMOZ THEN rank sub page by onpage factor. If no remove from top results. (more to filter, but these are the strongest rules - IMO)
Well, I just tried the most competitve commercial search that I have tried recently. It was a search for a certain type of computer equipment consumable.
While most of the top results are in ODP, it certainly was not all. Two on the first page were not, and three on the second page.
Like others have said, I think you have cause and effect confused.
I did my own reverse engineering and came to the conclusion that to be the head of any Fortune 500 company, you have to have a college degree. People who don't have a college degree don't have a chance. Oops, Bill Gates. Well, never mind.
