Forum Moderators: open
note: no bashing or flaming of the ODP or Google.
Just your view of how the world of Google and SERPs in your sector of the industry would change?
In mine's it would be massive, especially for companies who have enjoyed an extended relationship within the ODP only. There is thousands of them.
?
You wrote:
"Dude, your reality checked just bounced at the clue bank. If you honestly think that ODP editors control billions of dollars, you are so out of touch with the truth of the Internet I fear for you. "
DMOZ does control billions of dollars there is no doubt about it. If you want to be top ranked you have to have a DMOZ link. It is very difficult to rank well without one. I know personally of sites which the only difference was having the DMOZ link. Once an editor carelessly removed the link the sites suffered. Ranking changed from top 10 to top 300 on Google. The revenue generated went from several million per day to about 1/3 of that. This is only one small group of sites. There are millions of sites affected by DMOZ, of course the amount of money would be in the billions of dollars probably tens of billions.
Google uses DMOZ because it is the best directory available. Whether it should put so much weight on it is debatable, as seen in this thread.
Allan, it's unfathomable that a site would plummet from top ten down to 300 only because of an ODP link being removed and nothing else.
That sounds to me more like a penalty was imposed, and it could possibly have been related to something an editor also found. It may not have been accidentally removed from ODP. Follow along with the reasoning.
There are "groups" of sites interlinked back and forth with each other and others as well, with plenty of other inbound links, with a couple getting dynamite rankings not only because of other links but because of the accrued PR distributed among them from multiple high PR ODP listings which they should not currently legitimately have. Maybe they should have had those listings when the sites were first built and submitted, but not in the state they evolved to.
If those were "accidentally" removed, or taken out after being discovered or being shown or reported to a meta - or whatever - while it's true that they'd drop in rankings dramatically compared to the current killer rankings, they'd still have other links they'd gotten over time and still have the optimization applied to the site and would certainly not drop as far as 300.
I just wanted to chime in to back the idea of using Zeal instead of ODP
erm. to those people suggesting this - not a chance.
for one, zeal only lists "non commercial" sites (ok we all know there are many exceptions) so it is utterly incomplete as a directory.
The rankings for the site did not all drop to 300th some remained within top 100. I have contacted a meta about the problem though he was helpful, he was also slow about resolving the situation. I find editor's are quick to penalize but slow to admit mistakes and restore sites.
However, I was trying to complain about DMOZ. My point was that it does have a lot of dollar influence. The sites sites receive 1/3 what they used to because they did have other links which bring traffic. However, if you aren't in the top 30 on Google you are bascially invisible. The DMOZ link is usually the deciding factor between top10 and top 30.
I know of a site that was *removed* from DMOZ and subsequently went to the #1 slot.
DMOZ is just another link (well 2 links, because eventually G lists it in their version of the directory.)
There are some parts of the directory that have PR1 and even PR0, even the G directory is usually only 1 PR higher.
If I can get a couple of PR 0, 1, 2 or even PR 3 links, I have got the same benefit, and arguably, if "othersite.com" gives me my desired anchor text, I can do even better.
DMOZ is just another place that links to you, if you aren't listed, then you lose two link to your site, nothing more.
If you have 100+ "organic" inbound links, 2 ain't going to make or break you. If you have 10, well, yeah, it's going to make a huge difference.
--
Lots of sites use dmoz data, but most seem to be very low PR, and there is some evidence to suggest that G ignores these links at any rate.
[edited by: PatrickDeese at 8:42 pm (utc) on Sep. 19, 2003]
I'm not aware of even a single ODP editor with delusions of grandeur who believes such a thing.
>If you want to be top ranked you have to have a DMOZ link. It is very difficult to rank well without one. I know personally of sites which the only difference was having the DMOZ link. Once an editor carelessly removed the link the sites suffered. Ranking changed from top 10 to top 300 on Google. The revenue generated went from several million per day to about 1/3 of that. This is only one small group of sites. There are millions of sites affected by DMOZ, of course the amount of money would be in the billions of dollars probably tens of billions.
So let me get this right. Because of losing the ODP link this site lost $2,000,000 in revenues a day? D'ya have any idea how many juicy, high PR links I can get you buying them from webmasters if you have a budget of millions to throw at the effort? No ODP link means that much. This site went into the crapper for some other reason than the ODP.
Still my point is still valid DMOZ does have this power. Even if DMOZ affected only 100,000 sites and only had the effect of influencing their profit by $1000 per month (which I think is nothing). Then over a year $1.2 billion would be influenced by DMOZ. It is simple math. Now we all know there millions of sites and only about 3.8 million are listed (not all are commercial sites). So do the math.
[edited by: Marcia at 8:06 pm (utc) on Sep. 20, 2003]
[edited by: Marcia at 8:08 pm (utc) on Sep. 20, 2003]
If net profit is 2% of sales, that's over a million dollars a day profit. If I were in the PR brokerage business I'd have no problems being able to deliver links on PR7 pages with few other outbound links for under $1000 a month. For $10K a month, with links from 10 PR7 pages on different sites with the exactly wanted anchor text, this is gonna have a lot more Google ranking bounce than any ODP listing ever will. And if you are talking a company losing a million dollars profit a day, tens of thousands of dollars a month spent on buying high PR links would be pocket change to the buyer.
[edited by: rfgdxm1 at 10:30 pm (utc) on Sep. 19, 2003]
Actually it was more like $60 million per dayIf you're pulling that much in a day from search engine referrals and dmoz is more than than 1/1000 of your total link value something is wrong and it's not dmoz.
Where would Google find another provider that has in his index data for basically all the languages available on the net?
Don't even bother arguing with him. His math is bad.
$60 million per day is $22 billion. Amazon, which is just about the largest online retailier IIRC, has about $5 billion in revenue. Heck, Walmart only sells around $250 billion in their stores and online combined.
Any store that sells that much stuff would not be depending on ODP or google. They would have to have brand, and there ain't anyone with that much online brand.
DMOZ is only able to affect a business as much as any other link with comparable PR. Assuming the site is listed in a low PR section of DMOZ (along with the rest of us), it should be extremely easy (i.e. 5 mins work at the most) to get an inbound link to replace it.
Even if the link resided in one of the top level categories with PR8 or so, it would be a mere drop in the ocean for a company the size you mention. They'd just buy a high PR link, surely?
People sometimes are accused of relying too heavily on Google, which at least could be considered reasonable. Relying too heavily on DMOZ is just plain ridiculous. It would take just one afternoon's work to gather twenty times as many inbound links as one piddly little DMOZ listing.
I am in a fairly high PR DMOZ category at PR6. I had a slight increase in traffic the update after I got the DMOZ link (along with around 20 other decent links that month and hundreds of lesser links) of around 20%. The previous month I had a 220% increase in google traffic.
When the google directory PR7 link went in, it was the first month in my history that my traffic actually declined. If you are in a high enough category that the link actually is that important to you, they why don't you have a couple thousand other links to your site? If you don't, then I can't think of any case where your site would deserve to be in the high PR category.
And in any case, you are not "owed" a link from DMOZ. DMOZ gives authority to their editors, and allows them discretion within their rules within their own categories.
The only way that DMOZ editors can control the income of your business, no matter what the size, is if you are using really bad business practices.
ODP seems to be broke anyway. OK, editors say that their brief is to add quality sites and a huge backlog is not perceived as a problem. But it doesn't work. Try browsing through ODP. Half the links come up with an error:
The requested URL could not be retrievedWhile trying to retrieve the URL: [editors.dmoz.org:8081...]
The following error was encountered:
Access Denied.
Access control configuration prevents your request from being allowed at this time. Please contact your service provider if you feel this is incorrect.Your cache administrator is webmaster@dmoz.org.
Sometimes hitting F5 to refresh does the trick. Most often it doesn't.
Maybe it's just me getting these errors but if ODP is error prone, is Google better off without it?
That is actually the truth in so many areas.
The reason? In many sectors the ODP is a reality check... an actual human checking the site and grading it as a sensible site, on topic for the title and topic. That may seem a simple task, but mechanically, algorithmically, it isn't.
Having such a massive ratified directory, yes, with some faults, but of genuine quality, is a real plus for Google. So much so that in a decent percentage of areas its loss would make their SERPS very poor.
There is no substitute for human intervention in this respect.
Oh... and by the way.... I think most sensible people recognize that other human directories are simply not in the same league.
Having such a massive ratified directory, yes, with some faults, but of genuine quality, is a real plus for Google. So much so that in a decent percentage of areas its loss would make their SERPS very poor.
This point either gives ODP to much credit or doesnt give google's ability to crawl the web on its own enough credit.
But, dearest Google, if you want to play by these dumb rules we will simply create nonsense sites that sit nicely into these nonsense directories and from them we will create nonsense links to our real sites so we can artificially boost our PR.
I dont believe its that easy, but Im willing to put it to the test. I'll get back to you in 9 months with a follow-up if ODP actually indexes the site by then.
If Google dropped ODP, it would be a horrible blow to the quality of Internet searches.
ROFLMAO. What planet are you on? Most of the time when I try to search DMOZ I get a "server too busy,try again later message". For most of my searches I get ZERO returned results. Which internet searches would have this "horrible blow" dealt to their search quality?
I haven't even been able to submit a new url all week because DMOZ is having problems. On Monday it kept asking me for an editorial login when I clicked the submit button to submit my new url. For TWO DAYS after that it did nothing at all when I clicked submit. I gave up.
DMOZ is a dead albatross around Google's neck (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner).
>search
ODP is not a search engine and was never meant to be. No matter whether the search is adequate or not, it's most likely far from the top on whatever list of priorities they have. Standard directory navigation is to drill down through categories and that works.
They know all about the submit according to numerous posts here at the board, and it's no doubt a relief for some, giving a chance to catch up. I'm sure the longer the fix takes the better some will like it.
>>>If Google dropped the ODP
It would be something very useful missing. It's a very handy supplement to the search, and to be honest, the Google Directory looks just fine to me, from a user perspective.
The old saying goes that we don't miss what we don't know. If there are some fabulous sites that *should* be in there but aren't, searchers don't have a clue. I's only webmasters who know that the Directory is that much less rich than it would be with their site included in it. The rest of the world doesn't miss that site at all.
Or, to use the search function to find where in the taxonomy the specific category you are looking for happens to be. Which may be somewhere that while it makes sense to the editors, makes no sense by the way you would structure the taxonomy.
It would be something very useful missing. It's a very handy supplement to the search, and to be honest, the Google Directory looks just fine to me, from a user perspective.This is true. But would it not look just as fine if it had a white bar or grey bar?
I would say (hope) it's more a matter of 'when' Google drop the ODP rather than 'if'.
Dave
