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a) DMOZ is well known, and has lots of backlinks, which pass on PR (or whatever metric is more important than PageRank, when taking into account on-topic PR) to sites listed in its directory, or
b) DMOZ is so large and internally well linked that it is an on-topic authority even if no-one linked to it?
If its (a), then I have a sub-question. Let's say I have a website specialising in an obscure widget-A. As very few, possibly no, sites which link into DMOZ will be about widget-A, then how do those inbound links to DMOZ contribute to DMOZ being useful to my widget-A site.
My reason for asking is that if I have an established site focussed on widget-B with lots of on-topic widget-B inbound links, is there a way I can kind of morph the widget-B topic through to a widget-A topic through a sensible directory structure, and then link to my widget-A website, so that all those widget-B inbound links pass some on-topic value to my widget-A site?
I appreciate that my question may reveal a complete misunderstanding of the mechanisms at work, so hopefully I'll learn something from this post.
No. Let's face it, most of the editors on ODP aren't their for the fun of it.What fun is there? I see none, you mean to tell me you can have fun when reviewing sites for someone else (Without pay!)? :)
I provided proof of who it was and why they did it. I sent a couple of these reports to the right people. One of the ODP people on this thread was included. My response was ignored both times and I gave up. And now I can't report it anymore because the pages where I could prove who they were on the net disappeared. It used to be in Google's cache.
Take a look at the non-commercial cats at the ODP, and all the .gov, .edu, etc. sites listed there. There's tons of sites in the ODP that are there because volunteer editors chose to list them for "fun".
That's OK. Some people play golf, which seems like an insane way of ruining a perfectly good walk to other people. Some people read; others think that's "boring". Some people like to help other people in their spare time; other people can't see how that pays off.
I can't see the point of golf, but I read a hundred pages a day or more -- or suffer withdrawal symptoms. And I like to make information available. Before the ODP, I was indexing offline material for the fun of it.
So, yes, there are many people whose idea of fun corresponds closely to ODP editing activities. And we know we'll never outnumber the people that would rather watch pro wrestling on TV. And we know they won't understand us and we won't understand them. There are all kinds of people in the world, and it takes a good many of them to make up society. (I personally can't see why the pro wrestling fans shouldn't be anaesthatized, but that's life.)
[edited by: skibum at 1:17 am (utc) on Aug. 18, 2004]
What puzzles me is: you're more than five years old, judging by your spelling. And you've never yet run into anyone whose idea of fun was different from yours?Sure, Some people have differnet ideas of fun (Even five years old would know that!), but come on can you really see that has fun, When AOL is making money off of it? No they don't put ads on there site, but there are other ways to make money off of a site. This forum is for people to express what they think about webmaster related stuff.
[edited by: skibum at 1:18 am (utc) on Aug. 18, 2004]
Sure about that? Brett himself posted that he believes the ODP is on the "verge of collapse" because AOL considers it too much of an economic burden, and will ditch it. And, until recently the paid staff was one editor in chief, and a couple part time techs. If AOL is somehow making money off the ODP with this small of an economic investment in it, then the mere suggestion that AOL would ditch it would be crazy.
You think?
And some Pro Wrestling fans may go into apoplectic fits if they find out someone's making money off THEIR entertainment?
No doubt...
And Mothers Against Drunk Driving just about closed down last year when someone noticed that fewer traffic accidents would mean more profits for insurance corporations.
I think not.
I think it's a sick, sick, sick mind that cannot enjoy any activity unless it harms the entire rest of the world.
The ODP's economic impact is really hard to measure. Did it contribute to Google's early reputation by providing good spider seed? Did it knock tens of millions of dollars per year income off of Looksmart, and contribute to relegating it to a glorified classified ads site? How much, if any, does it contribute to the income of its licensees? How much does it depress the financial return of Microsoft's "fully monetized" search and other commercial search engines or directories? How much more (or less) time do people spend online because they can find what they're looking for more efficiently? How does that impact the bottom line of ISPs or TelCo's or alternative recreational businesses like TV and movies? How many lives will be saved because people spent their evening surfing the net, rather than sharing the road with drunk golfers or sober pro wrestling fans?
I don't know, and I don't care.
What I care about is that my work is available for ANYONE to use to make information on the internet more accessable. I care about when my son needs information for a school assignment -- and after Yahoo search gives him NOTHING and Google search gives tens of thousands of irrelevant hits, the ODP gives him three sites, providing two independent views of the topic at hand. I care about the people who ask me questions I can't answer -- and I've often been able to send them to an ODP category in perfect confidence that the answer will be there.
Not necessarily for non-commercial topics. If the subject were ancient Greek history, starting with .edu sites may well be a starting point than the ODP. However, if someone was looking for fan sites of a certain rock music artist, then likely the ODP would be a better starting point.
I think the .edu and .gov domains are a better starting point than ODP.
That would depend on how well the individual .edu/.gov site is maintained. If the maintainer diligently maintains their links and checks them daily, the page is more authoritative than most ODP categories. However, nowadays when someone builds a good informative/scholarly site that earns .edu and .gov links and then loses interest or fumbles the domain name renewal, the site will almost immediately reappear as a spammer's site.
As for fan sites, etc, I'm sure it doesn't take much until it all gets spidered. Don't forget, there is no doubt that Google has a list of all domains as well as gets daily updates of new domains and modified ownership...and that the homepage of every domain gets spidered whether it's in ODP or linked from another page. So of the ODP database, how many are inner page urls?
The more I think about it, the less important the initial spider is in my mind. For the base domain it's unneeded, for the inner pages of a domain? The important pages will show up anyways by the various other means as mentioned above.
The catgegorization remains useful though.
Dmoz have their own public forums for abuse, IMO thats where these types of discussions should stay.
Back to the original question:
Due to Dmoz being regarded as an authoritative site for most of the categories it has - the chances that your widget-A site getting a good boost from Dmoz has a higher chance. As martinibuster has already said though, with the amount of links that some categories have it can be better for the webmaster to look elsewhere for a link.
That is from lack of looking, not from lack of something to find.
.edu sites are, I agree, often excellent sources of information and links. (I'm very proud of the links _I_ get from them.) But ... stable they aren't. Students graduate, teachers move, site admins rearrange the whole university network at the drop of a pocket protector, sites get abandoned or lost. A typical university site will be FAR less stable than a typical real business site. And it is painful for us at the ODP, because the university sites get deeplinked so extensively.
Good, yes; but reliable source of good links, no.
It's painful to me to see that my categories are so poorly treated and even though I'm busy as hell, I offered my services as well as some resources at my disposal to help out with the various cats to make sure they were treated properly. I disclosed any potential conflicts. I was totally ignored. Which I understand, because you guys are overwhelmed. But in my cat, the resources listed are not the right ones.
brmmbrmm asks a good, straightforward question and I think it deserves some answers.
We all know that an inbound link from DMOZ to your website is valuable for your Google ranking. Does anyone have a view as to whether that is mainly because:a) DMOZ is well known, and has lots of backlinks, which pass on PR (or whatever metric is more important than PageRank, when taking into account on-topic PR) to sites listed in its directory, or
Yes, it's a huge PageRank generator, because it has a root PR of 9 and continues to generate "meaningful" (to Google) links even quite deep down. The ODP's PR9 is generated through a combination of two main factors, firstly natural inbound links that any site can attract, and secondly because it's a stipulation of the ODP data use license to link back to the directory. This generates massive numbers of backlinks.
b) DMOZ is so large and internally well linked that it is an on-topic authority even if no-one linked to it?
No. Apart from some alleged manual tweaking that Google can do, for a site to *pass* PageRank (i.e authority) it must first *earn* PageRank from other sites.
If its (a), then I have a sub-question. Let's say I have a website specialising in an obscure widget-A. As very few, possibly no, sites which link into DMOZ will be about widget-A, then how do those inbound links to DMOZ contribute to DMOZ being useful to my widget-A site.
This is a much more difficult question to answer. The commonly accepted answer is that Google doesn't "theme" PageRank in that way, and that the boost you get to your site ranking is purely to do with the passing of PageRank (plus what's in the anchor text). There are many people who believe though that Google *is* starting to "theme" PageRank to give a boost to links from related sites. Since the ODP doesn't have a theme that could have an impact, if it's true.
I think what you're asking is how can a link from the ODP about widget-A be authoritive, if it hasn't earned the reputation of being an authority on widget-A from elsewhere? Well, it doesn't need to because Google regards the ODP as an authoritive site in general. However, because PageRank tends to diminish the deeper you go in the directory, more obscure categories will get less PageRank passed, and sites considered by ODP editors to be authorititive or important will get MORE PageRank from being in higher categories, which by happy coincidence is exactly the sort of thing that Google wants.
My reason for asking is that if I have an established site focussed on widget-B with lots of on-topic widget-B inbound links, is there a way I can kind of morph the widget-B topic through to a widget-A topic through a sensible directory structure, and then link to my widget-A website, so that all those widget-B inbound links pass some on-topic value to my widget-A site?
Again, two answers here. The commonly accepted view is that a link is a link and will pass PageRank in the usual way no matter what the topics of the sites are. The alternate (but unproven view) is that Google does have some idea of what sort of sites should link to other sorts of sites and it can discount or degrade non-relevant links.
OK, let's just expand on the second theory for a while because it DOES link back to the ODP..
Let's say that Google decides that it want to assign a "theme" to each site, and in this case Google's highly trained pigeons are looking at Blue Widget manufacturers. Google can start off by looking at the relevant ODP category and compile a list of sites. Easy so far, but as it happens that category is a little neglected and for every site listed there's another relevant site NOT awaiting review and yet another relevant site that has NEVER been submitted. Google doesn't know this, but it's a racing certaintly that most categories cannot cover 100% of relevant sites. However, if Google maps the inbound and outbound links of the sites that ARE listed then it can come up a list of sites that are at least RELATED to Blue Widget manufacturing, and by further mapping inbound and outbound links of the NEW sites, further sites can be found. It's even possible to assign a Blue Widget relevancy score (i.e. themed PageRank) to each site based on the linking structure. Repeat those steps half a million times for each ODP category, and you've got a pretty good (if fuzzy) map of most of the web. Then, if you type a keyword the Google knows is Blue Widget related, it can factor in the "theming" when it gives the results. And this will reduce the value of irrelevant links.
No, I'm not saying this is how Google *does* work. I'm saying this is how Google *might* work, if not now then in the future. Teoma already uses something similar to give additional results, and perhaps other SEs will do something similar even if Google doesn't.
The bottom line is that the best kind of link is a link from a related "authority" site. So, perhaps the links to seek are not just from the ODP but from ODP *listed* sites that are relevant to the site you want to promote. But any high PageRank link (with relevant anchor text) should give you some benefit.
I would add to this that Google also gives importance to your DMOZ listing cause it is using its database for its own directory. Do you give your own children more importance than to other kids?
In other words, if your company is listed in both Google and DMOZ databases, I would say it is normal that Google gives it more importance since it matches both databases for its results as it is said on Google's website in this form "Google's regular web search results are enhanced by information from the Google directory".
