Google Directory vs. DMOZ directory

In Google and DMOZ directories but not on directory page at Google

[momof3boys]

Thanks for any thoughts on my predicament.

I've been in communication with Google regarding my "lost" directory listing in the Business > Small Business > Home Office > Work at Home Parents. I've been in the DMOZ directory for over two years in that category. However, my listing is not showing up on the Google directory list for that same category.

The strange thing is that my site is TECHNICALLY in the Google directory. If you search for my site in the directory, it shows up as being in the directory. However, no blue category hyperlink is shown with my Google listing.

The Google webmaster indicates that my site has not been banned. In fact, my site main page has a PR6 (good content, no tricks)

I've been hoping that the new DMOZ dump would fix the problem, but there's no change. I have noticed that Google shows there should be 36 sites listed in their Business > Small Business > Home Office > Work at Home Parents category, but only 31 sites are actually listed. I've also noticed that DMOZ's Business > Small Business > Home Office > Work at Home Parents category directory has 34 sites listed.

Any ideas on what the problem could be? Any ideas on how I should proceed? I've been emailing back and forth with [e-mail] on and off for weeks. No one who emails me from Google seems to know what the problem is or how to fix it.

Liz

[hyperion]

I've got a similiar problem. We were listed in a regional category before the dmoz update for a .de domain, and in the meantime also got a listing in the international directory for the english translation, and the same domain ending with .com.
Now, with the update, the listing in the regional category just disappeard, though it is still in dmoz...
I think the RDF-dump had some serious bugs, would have been a big coincidence if the first dump that dmoz thought had no errors after some months of trying unsuccesfully would really have been flawless.

[TheComte]

I've got a similar problem. One of my sites is on a DMOZ PR4 page. In the Google Directory, it is PR0. Are they penalizing their own pages? hehe. I think they screwed up this go-a-round with the Google Directory and hopefully it will be corrected by the next update.

[ga_ga]

Very similar situation here. Category 'should' have 20 sites, only 16 listed, I'm one of the 4 missing ones. I'm hoping things will presently right themselves, given time.

[momof3boys]

Glad I'm not the only one. Can one of the experienced members comment on how to handle our situations? Google Guy, are you out there?

Liz

[hyperion]

Is there any other directory out there that imported all of the current RDF-dump? Then we could check if the problem is with googles import, or with the RDF?
Else, I'll sit it out till the next update, the category I won is better than the one I lost, though having both would still be nice...

[korkus2000]

Excites directory is stale but is newer than lycos, AOL, etc. Are you guys finding your sites in there?

[momof3boys]

Hi, Korkus.

My site is listed in the Business > Small Business > Home Office > Work at Home Parents categories at Excite, Lycos and AOL. TECHNICALLY I'm in the Google Business > Small Business > Home Office > Work at Home Parents Directory, but my listing isn't showing and I don't have the underlined link to that category in the index.

Thanks for any recommendations.I would be happy to share my web site name, but I guess it's not allowed here. I would be happy to be a guinea pig for the group if that might help further understanding into the issue.

Liz

[ga_ga]

No, but my category there looks the same as Google's before the update. Noticed it contains a listing for an old site of mine which no longer exists, & has been removed from dmoz & also now the Google directory. Lost 1 listing, didn't gain another. oh dear. Just sitting on my backside here hoping things will come allright in the wash.

[korkus2000]

momof3boys if it is in Excite then I suspect it is not an RDF issue. They must be having a tech problem on Google side. I guess you are the mercy of the Google techs.

[hyperion]

@momof3boys & to clear up my first post:
somehow my case seems to be the inverted case of yours, my second listing is still there if you browse through the directory, but no pagerank is shown for it, and it does not turn up in pure directory search, and no hyperlink if the page is found in web search.
Some nice memeber stickied me a url for a page that seems to have the current RDF-dump. As I tried to browse to my category, which was under "/World/Deutsch", which has to be entered via a "See also"-link in "Regional/Germany/" I only got a 404.
So I think dmoz still has a problem with the category ids (that was the problem with the RDF-dump all the time, at least as far as I understood.) To elaborate a bit: A directoy is built as a hierarchical tree in the first place. To accomodate duplicate themes in different places in the tree, a category is linked visible by a "@" before the category in dmoz or Yahoo. Now, if you mess up your category ids a bit, you will mess up the links in the database by magnitudes more, and that is what happened at dmoz, at least for the rdf-dump. I think there may be a consistent category category tree in the rdf-dump, but if you try to cope with linked categories, it becomes inconsistent (referential integrity of the db seems to be f**d up), and then the results are more or less random for different queries you do on the database. And that is what we are seeing, apparently - the "count"-query for a category shows different numbers from the query to actually get the results, which gets different results from the pagerank-query,...

[momof3boys]

Thanks for the replies Korkus and Hyperion.

Is there any higher Google power that visits here who might have some insights? The people who email me from [e-mail] seem not to know or have the time to investigate. For example, here is a reply from them just yesterday (I've replaced my real site name with "mysite" for posting purposes here):

Hi Elizabeth,

I searched for www.mysite.com on dmoz and got no results:

[search.dmoz.org...]

Also, when you search for www.mysite.com in the Google Directory, your
site comes up, but it does not have a category assigned to it. So I am not
sure if this is a problem with dmoz or a problem with Google.

Regards,
The Google Team

Of course, I figured out that they couldn't find the site at DMOZ because they were searching for "www.mysite.com" instead of "mysite." I wrote them back and haven't heard any more.

This is the kind of thing I've been going through for many weeks now. Everyone has been very nice, but I feel like I'm just banging my head against a wall. I need to change direction, but I'm not sure where to head.

Thanks for any other insights or recommendations.

Liz

[swerve]

I've got a similar problem. One of my sites is on a DMOZ PR4 page. In the Google Directory, it is PR0. Are they penalizing their own pages?

One thing that is important to note (though it doesn't answer all the questions in this thread) is that it appears that Google did not spider the new Directory. When the deep crawl occured, Google still had the old directory, and this old directory is what is contained in the web search index. I assume this means that the PR for Google Directory categories is based on the old directory.

swerve

Ps. I noticed this when a web search for "site:directory.google.com mysite" did not return my Google Directory category. My site has just been added to the Google Directory...

[hyperion]

Hi momof3boys,

if I am right, you won't find anyone who can help you at google. If the dmoz-RDF is wrong, all you can do is wait for dmoz to produce a really correct one (alas, once again...). Apart from this thread, I've read many messages stating similiar problems with the new directory. So it is not a problem of some flag set wrong for your site, but some programmer made an error, which affects us. The best thing you can do is somehow get the message to google that your site is affected by an error either in rdf-dump or their import of the dump, but you have done that already. Apart from that, I think the best thing to do is forget some months about it, and enjoy the spring ;-) - hoping for fast resolutions in cases involving dmoz is futile, imho.

[momof3boys]

Hyperion, you are SO right! It's time to enjoy the Spring.

By the way, I just got another email from the Google Web Team. They say they now see the problem and hope it will be fixed once they update the directory. It seems it might be a few weeks.

Liz

[steveb]

Excellent catch swerve. I was wondering about that. The old Google Directory is still influencing the search results. We are still one update away from the big changes from all those old, dead sites being culled from having a good link, and all the new ones having their new one.

This explains the relative tameness of this update.

[Fiete]

Does anybody have an update history for the DMOZ dump into the google directory?

This could explain a lot.