Google injects its directory with fresh DMOZ data

At last!

[helleborine]

Beginning yesterday, I've started receiving mucho traffic from the Google version of DMOZ.

Anyone else has experienced this?

[ganderla]

I have not received traffic, but I do notice an update.

[helleborine]

I was not receiving any traffic before, as my site was not in Google's antiquated version of the ODP. It went from ZERO to ALOT overnight, I couldn't fail to notice.

I wonder if it will increase relevancy of regular Google search results over time, with the extra dose of human-edited links?

Anyone knows?

[hutcheson]

Are you sure the referrals are from the directory itself? Most reports suggest that fewer than 10% of Google users use the directory.

[tschild]

Definitely an update of the Google directory. After the last update the English-language categories with non-ASCII chars in the category path (e.g. the Pokémon categories) did not work; now they do.

[cbpayne]

I am not seeing any update in the Google Directory

[helleborine]

hutcheson,

Yes, they are from the directory.

Because of my stubborn refusal to make my site less user-friendly to come up higher in Google searches, my site is >300th in for the relevant target keywords.

Now, the Google directory page where my site is listed shows up in the search much, much higher in the SERPs than my site; thus a disproportional share of my Google traffic is from this directory link.

Is it possible that Google has only updated part of its directory at this particular time?

[tschild]

Looking at some recent changes: a URL change made on 30 March in dmoz is in the Google Directory; a change made on 1 April is not. Of course that is not definitive as to the freshness of the data because different branches (and different Google servers) might have data from different RDF dumps.

[Stud_Lee]

I finally saw my site included in the Google Directory today. I've been listed in DMOZ since 04/11. Maybe they are updating it several categories at a time?

Has anyone that has recently been listed in that directory recieved credit for the backlink from Google yet? I am not showing links from there OR from DMOZ in a link search. It seems that I should have at least the link from DMOZ since I was in that directory a couple of weeks before this last update.

[cbpayne]

>I am not seeing any update in the Google Directory

I have to take that comment back - yes it has been updated or is still updating.

[Visi]

Not sure when, but they have added directory link back to the listings...that may be reson for more directory traffic? Was removed with changes at the beginning of the month.

[Visi]

And then the links in the serps were gone again....lol

[g1smd]

There have been a few troubles with the ODP data in the last couple of months. These occurred when all of the data was converted to UTF-8. Some entries had a non-valid character in them that could not be converted. For one or two versions (weeks), the RDF file had a huge number of encoding errors in it. Google may have had some issues in using the data. Certainly there were some corrupted entries showing at the Google end for a couple of weeks.

Over the last few weeks those errors have all been edited out at the ODP end. Editors had to work on tens of thousands of listings to edit out the duff character in site titles and descriptions, category names, and in the various category descriptions and charters etc.

The last of these edits were completed a few days ago; and maybe those were just in time for the next RDF. Hopefully the errors found will be close to zero in the next RDF.

There is still some work to do on correcting some @links, and FAQs though; which may take a week or two more, yet. When it is all completed, the data will be a lot easier to use.

Prior to the conversion, there were dozens of different encodings in use across the directory, and this make linking from one category, using one encoding to another category, using a different encoding, quite a challenge. Things like that should be a lot easier in the future.