Using DMOZ Data Will Get You Banned

Study shows large percentage of sites using DMOZ data are banned by Google

[Altair]

A site has a study that says almost half of sites (in their random sample) using Open Directory (DMOZ) data have been banned by Google, MSN Search, or Yahoo Search. It does not seem to matter how the data is used. Google seemed to be much more likely to ban such sites than MSN or Yahoo. The study suggests that Open Directory is no longer really "open" because it cannot be used without fear of being banned.

[edited by: skibum at 6:07 am (utc) on April 5, 2006]
[edit reason] Removed link [/edit]

[skibum]

This probably has more to do with duplicate content issues than the ODP specifically. If you simply copy lots of content from any site be it dmoz or anywhere else your site probably isn't going to do so well in Google.

[cbpayne]

The study suggests that Open Directory is no longer really "open" because it cannot be used without fear of being banned.

Please explain what this has to do with DMOZ?

It has absolutely nothing to do with the banning of sites listed in DMOZ, it is just Google and other search engines not listing some of the sites that use the DMOZ data due to duplicate content issues!

>4000 sites use DMOZ data and 1000's of them are still listed in Google.

[victor]

longer discussion in concurrent thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[wmuser]

An issue must be related to a duplicate content,but in this case Dmoz is an open directory and you may syndicate their content,however Google bot must have missed that fact and consider it as duplicate content