What's wrong with DMOZ? A lot...

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Respect For DMOZ? It's a two way street...
by PeterD, SEOBook.com
May 5, 2009

A DMOZ editor complains, "Everybody loves Google, everybody loves Wikipedia - so why doesn't everybody love DMOZ?"

My blog post would be rather long if I listed all the reasons why I think people don't love DMOZ, so I'll stick to fisking the contents of the editors post.

For those who don't know what DMOZ is, and that would be the vast majority of web users, DMOZ is a largely redundant internet directory that came about back when Yahoo! Directory was too slow at processing listing requests.

Webmasters familiar with DMOZ will appreciate the obvious irony, given that you can now get a Yahoo Directory listing in a couple of days, whereas DMOZ is a hit and miss affair, specializing mostly in "miss".

...read the full article

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Part of the issue for internet marketers and webmasters is that there's a prevailing misconception that somehow getting a listing for your site in DMOZ (aka the Open Directory Project or ODP) will provide an element of credibility for your site and a bump up in search engine rankings. Neither is true.

Matt Cutts of Google, among others, has commented on this more than once:

SEO article in Newsweek

In comments:

Originally Posted by Matt Cutts

Matt Said,
December 12, 2005 @ 9:48 am

Yahoo links are helpful because they’re high PageRank, but that’s the only reason; there’s no special “Yahoo boost” or edu-boost or gov-boost. Those links just tend to be higher quality.

Lightning Round!

And Thomas writes in and says does Google index or rank blog sites differently than regular web sites. That’s a good question, not really. Some one else asked about links from gov’s and edu’s and whether links from two levels deep gov’s and edu’s, like gov.pl are worth the same as .gov, and the fact is that we don’t really have much in the way of saying oh this is a link from the ODP or from .gov or .edu so give that some sort of special boost. It’s just those sites tend to have higher Pagerank because more people link to them and reputable people link to them.

I’m on debunking duty
Matt Cutts
December 8, 2006

In comments:

Originally Posted by Matt Cutts

December 8, 2006 @ 7:51 pm

There is no special “ODP boost.” The PageRank value of a link from an ODP page is solely because that ODP page has high PageRank.

Regarding the last point, DMOZ pages do not necessarily have high PR, and even where they do you must consider how much of that value will pass to your site/page. As with any other page with outgoing links, the amount of PR ("link juice") passed to your page (usually your home page if you're listed in DMOZ) is a function of the PageRank of the page containing the link (i.e., the DMOZ category page in this case) multiplied by a dampening factor (usually thought to be approximately 0.85) divided by the total number of outgoing links (including internal navigation links) on the originating page. So if you are lucky enough to be listed on a PR5 or PR6 page (or even a PR8 page, an unlikely event at DMOZ) containing 100-200 links, you're not going to receive a whole lot of "link juice" for your page.

[Blackpool]

I read that article on the dmoz blog and the comments were not friendly towrds dmoz at all.

Getting into dmoz these days are very hard indeed.