DMOZ

Recently, Google removed the “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!” suggestion from its guidelines. One would accept this if mentioning Yahoo alone was removed as it’s an competitor. But why DMOZ? Does this mean Google also accepts the fact that DMOZ has lost all the importance it had few years back or does Google mean it’s no longer going to give importance to such directories?

I had written an article “DMOZ is Dead” few months back which clearly states the huge failures the world’s largest human edited directory is facing.

1. A large number of dead links
2. It is extremely difficult and you should really feel lucky if you even get a mail back stating that your link was submitted or the reason for rejection.
3. Huge number of duplicate links
4. Messed up Categories and Sub Category duplicates.
5. Very slow or no response from DMOZ volunteering editors.

But this might not just be the only reason for Google to remove recommending postings to DMOZ. As one might be aware, a large number of search engine optimizers and webmasters post their websites to thousands of free and paid directories to bring up their rankings. This can be a serious issue from Google’s standpoint as encouraging this would make it difficult to analyze genuine websites who do not go for such short cut methods to bring up rankings.

In a recent webmaster chat conference, Google had this to say:

Question: Recently, you removed this suggestion: “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!” from your guidelines. Is there any chance that you will be discounting these kinds of links for ranking value in future?

Google’s Matt Cutt answers: There’s always the chance that we’ll discount directory links in the future. What we were seeing was quite a few novice people would see the “directory” recommendation and go out and just try to submit to a ton of directories, even if some of the directories were lower-quality or even fly-by-night directories that weren’t great for users. Right now we haven’t changed how we’re weighting directory links–we’ve only removed the directory suggestion from the webmaster guidelines.

DMOZ is the Internet’s largest human edited directory. But the giant is dead long time back. It is quite ridiculous to think why Google still gives so much importance to the DMOZ listing when it is filled with broken, duplicate and promotional links.

The multilingual open content directory owned by Netscape is maintained by a large community of volunteering editors. However, there have been huge delays and flaws in approving links. Some webmasters have tried for years in vain to have their genuine websites listed. Visit some DMOZ categories in random and you can find that almost half of the listed links are broken or contain some unprofessional disorganized sites. How can an editor approve these sites but not allow genuine professional sites even if the correct category is chosen? So does this mean:

1. The volunteering editors give favoritism
2. Some of the editors are also search engine experts who try to have his/her client websites alone listed.
3. The editor can also reject a site if he/she finds the site to be their personal site competitor.

The above possibilities cannot be ruled out. Yes, there are a large number of editors who practice the ones above. Any webmaster would accept the claim.Reasons for DMOZ being dead include:

1. A large number of broken links. Don’t editors check these old links in the categories they maintain?
2. Multiple submissions. Thousands of websites have multiple listings on DMOZ when DMOZ guidelines clearly states one URL per domain. How did the editors approve? Do they not find out if it was already submitted before approving it?
3. Large number of promotional sites with promotional words listed. Again, this is against DMOZ guidelines. How come these are approved by editors when we hear stories from webmasters that their genuine websites are not being approved for years?
4. Editor selection is weird. Existing editors’ come up with weird reasons to reject your application for becoming an Open Directory editor. Interested volunteers have reported that they have been rejected even after following all the rules and guidelines. The rejection mail states no specific reason for rejection.

With internet technology growing in a fast phase, users demand updates every second. DMOZ is old and outdated and does not fit the new internet trend. DMOZ has been killed by slow and greedy editors. It is high time DMOZ goes for a paid editor strategy or a paid & reviewed listing like Yahoo. It is even funny to see Google still giving all the importance to DMOZ by having DMOZ database as the Google Directory.Rumors are that DMOZ might soon be sold to BOTW.org and made into a paid directory. Let’s wait and watch the things which will unfold.

Are you uncomfortable letting your kids search using popular search engines? Well, there are a whole lot of search engines for kids. These search engines filter out sites which are not suitable for kids. These kids search engines use its employees to manually filter out bad sites which are not suitable for children.
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