This SEO article has been published by Jason Smith
I was once told by a client to “make sure I’m in DMOZ as I have read that when it comes to online directories DMOZ is the daddy.” It still makes me laugh even reciting this sentence. The scary thought is there is probably someone out there with a t-shirt that says “DMOZ - the Daddy of Directories” on it. .
Let’s start by explaining what DMOZ is? DMOZ is owned by Netscape and is the name used to describe the Open Directory Project (ODP). The word DMOZ actually used to stand for directory.mozilla.org which was the directories original domain name. As you can tell by now DMOZ is a directory. In fact it is the Internet's largest directory system (over 4 million web sites).
Submission to the directory is free and every very website that is added to the DMOZ directory is manually reviewed by a human editor before it is included. This is where it starts to get a bit frustrating as getting in can take a very long time. Oh and to make this doubly clear it can take a VERY long time indeed. The problem website owners face with DMOZ is that if your submission is rejected you are not actually informed. Therefore there are some website owners out there who think their submissions are still pending or they are now in the directory, when in fact they have not been entered.
In the SEO community there is a lot of talk about whether DMOZ is still a critical part of an SEO or link building strategy or not any more? It has been a huge topic of debate in forums and Blogs across the internet. In a poll by Search Engine Roundtable in July 2009 it showed that 62% of people submitted once to DMOZ and then forgot about it and 20% didn’t bother submitting at all.
This shows a realistic approach most website owners or SEO companies should take when approaching DMOZ. It is always advisable to submit to it as it only takes 10 minutes and then move on swiftly to gaining other links. It would be silly not to submit to DMOZ purely because Google still uses DMOZ as its back-up directory source and until that concept changes, DMOZ will always be important to have your website listed on there.
The biggest advantage if you do get listed in DMOZ is that it creates two significant quality back links for a website. The first link is from DMOZ itself and the second comes from the Google directory, both of which have a decent PageRank. Then you also have to consider the thousands of other links from small sites that have downloaded and use the DMOZ directory. The link from DMOZ has extra considerable weight in search engines because DMOZ is a human edited directory so greater trust is applied to the link.
Another benefit is being able to capture any traffic from people searching the directory itself. However not many people actually use DMOZ to search for a specific website in the same way that they use other directories like the Yahoo! Directory. For that reasons alone I would not hold your breath on that front as DMOZ itself offers little value in generating direct traffic.
I have actually read posts previously that have implies that some DMOZ editors actually accept money to speed up submissions into the directory and that some individuals became DMOZ editors in a bid simply promote their own websites. However I must state that these are rumours. I’m sure a vast majority of editors are not in it for personal gain and do care about the directory and about adding new sites. I guess it must be a hard job because there is simply not enough editors for such a bust directory and I bet the quality of some of the submissions are also very poor. My only concern about a purely human-edited directory – apart from the possible corruption element – is that we humans are prone to errors so that fact concerns me. Who monitors the monitors
So back to our original point – is DMOZ “the daddy of directories”? I personally would not go that far, but I do agree that DMOZ is the largest, most comprehensive directory online however I would also like to point out that Yahoo Directory is a strong contender for this crown.
Getting into the DMOZ directory is clearly an important step if you are serious about promoting your website online. However being blinkered into believing that a DMOZ directory entry is the answer to online success is simply incorrect. Don’t forget that there are a lot of other online directories out that can also have a positive effect on your site and will not take as long to be accepted into. So all I’m saying here is don’t focus all your efforts on just DMOZ but aim to submit your website to many different directories so that your website is not dependent on a single source.
If you are looking for any SEO advice or you would like to know more about SEO services then email me - Jason Smith