Forum Moderators: open
After a long and hard fought battle, I got my Florida/OOP/whatever dropped site a nice DMOZ listing.
Does anyone know if:
A) These are still important to rankings (I read a post a while back that said they didn't seem to be helping)
B) When the last directory update was - my site is showing up in the Google Directory but the directory category info is not showing in the SERP listing
C) If there is a usual lag between Google updating its DMOZ directory info and that little grey category link showing up
I also spent the $299 for a Yahoo listing in hopes of getting back to the top for a not-so-competitive two keyword phrase.
My apologies in advance for screwing up the acronyms and verbage.
You can load the Google toolbar and go to the categories where you're listed, to estimate the value to your site of a link from that page -- obviously subcategory pages have a PR of somewhat below 10. (In the long run, you should inflate the ODP value slightly -- say increment by .5 or so -- because of the many ODP licensees that will eventually pick it up.)
In the future, algorithms like Hilltop may give more value to links from sites that are successful at linking to sites generally recognized by their peers as worthy of links. If and when this happens, I'd imagine many pages at the major directories would be classified as "highly-reliable hubs", which would boost their effect on page rank. But nobody is claiming to see that yet -- unless that is what Florida was, and I wonder.
In the end, it doesn't matter much how good those links are. They aren't good enough to base a business plan on; they aren't worthless enough to ignore. Get Yahoo if you can afford it, apply to ODP...and then while waiting for an ODP listing, get busy rustling up links from somewhere else.
I disagree about this in most cases if the rationale is Google rankings. You can buy a lot more PR for $299 a year than what you'll get in most Yahoo directory categories. Yahoo is worth it only if the traffic it sends by people using it as a directory covers the $299 a year cost.
I always had the impression that google used dmoz and yahoo to seed their crawls. with a new site, getting into either or both of these directories would get the new site crawled sooner and deeper.
I don't know how true this is anymore with the freshdeepbot, but it seemed to be true with the old deep crawler.
Of course it also depends how deep your category is burried in the directory as to whether it is worth it.
IMO. Yahoo is currently riding on their name and the fact they use Google. When they drop Google I think they will also drop.
B) When the last directory update was - my site is showing up in the Google Directory but the directory category info is not showing in the SERP listing
To me it looks like google stopped adding new category links to the dmoz'd search result listings more than 6 months ago:
Two of my sites are listed at DMOZ + Google Dir since July 2003. The cache of the dmoz category at google shows Last update: 14:25 PT, Thursday, July 10, 2003 with my sites listed. Still no category links added to my listings at the google serps though ...
The snippet shown in the serps, and the green icon on the toolbar, were updated early June.
This is kinda like changing your left sock five months after your change your right one.
GG if you are listening, please forward the request again.
If you are a wbmaster of a travel site, and you use the google directory to find a local car dealer, then you are being a user. Then your complaint about it being out of date has more clout.
They updated the SERPS with Directory Category links many months before updating the contents of the directory itself. The directory content was updated in 2003 March, and then not again until 2003 November. Things have really slowed down, and got out of step, with what Google used to do.
