DMOZ - Still Necessary, Still Hated
If you are a webmaster, you know what DMOZ is. If you are new to building web sites and site optimization, you will soon learn what DMOZ is. DMOZ is a human edited directory located at http://www.dmoz.org and is used to power the directory for Google.
DMOZ also powers directories for many other search engines and is provided free of charge to those search engines. A listing in DMOZ is critical for any webmaster serious about ranking well on other search engines, the most powerful being Google.
Getting a listing on DMOZ is difficult if not almost impossible. All listing submissions are reviewed by a handful of overburdened human editors. Finding the appropriate category to submit to, writing a concise title and description, and a long wait are all ingredients to a successful DMOZ submission.
It is highly speculated by the webmaster community in general that DMOZ is also very corrupt. Searches for DMOZ complaints will almost always show forums where there have been much discussion on how most of the category editors have personal websites in their category and will regularly delete submissions, change descriptions to be meaningless, and overall squelch any new submissions or their competitors submissions.
Several forums covering this topic are;
http://www.v7n.com/forums/web-directory-issues/23616-dmoz-corrupt.html
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=5999
http://richardz.blogspot.com/2005/01/corrupt-dmoz-editor.html
An excerpt from the blog above reads like this…
Sabotaging a Competitors DMOZ Listing for Fun & Profit
The Wisdom of Weeding Out the Competitors
It is imperative to join DMOZ and sabotage your competitors. No offense intended, but if you don’t join DMOZ you are ignoring a fundamental strategy for promoting your website. Your website’s viability depends on you getting into DMOZ and sabotaging every single one of your competitors. If your competitors beat you to the editorship your website will be toast faster than you can say, “Am I homeless yet?”
“My arch competitor had a dupe content subdomain that they set up for traffic overflow and I changed their dmoz listing to the subdomain with duplicate content and it slaughtered their rankings for a couple of months.
Speaking as someone with 4 years of sabotaging experience, switch their listing from www. to non-www from time-to-time. Switch them from www.example.com to www.example.com/index.html, stuff like that.”
Everybody is doing it. You should too!
I don’t care if you believe me or not. The economics is enough motivation to make it happen. Here are the most common techniques for sabotaging a competitor:
Let it be
Let the site sit in the Unreviewed Queue. Don’t edit it. Don’t touch it. Never click on the link to visit the site. Just pretend it isn’t there.
Across the universe
In the DMOZ editor dashboard you have the option to move the contributed website to a “more appropriate” category. Move it to the lowest level cat you can find, preferably a cat that is not currently edited, and one that has over sixty other websites in it. This cat must be related topically, but not really appropriate. After a year it will probably get bounced to another category and so on, and eventually end up back in your category. Wait six months or a year, then do it again.
The long and winding road
At some point you have to let in a competitor or two. Butcher the submission. Strip the title of important keywords and replace them with useless variations that nobody searches on. Mutilate the description because the last thing you want is for someone to actually click on it. A short and irrelevant description is the way to go. Don’t go overboard. It has to be defensible. When your competitor’s website reaches the end of the submission road, he or she will wish they never submitted.
AOL/TimeWarner own DMOZ and they treat it like the dollar chasing b***h it really is. And you should, too. Sabotaging your competitors is not simply about deleting their sites from the categories, but a more subtle and ongoing process of destroying their relevance for important keyword phrases.
You have to do what you have to do. The person who ranks at the top of the search engines sleeps better than the webmaster whose site is on page eighty six of the serps. Sabotaging your competitors is one way to get there.
There is a forum set up just for DMOZ editors located at http://resource-zone.com/forum/Â
A quick glance through this forum will show you quickly how frustrating it is trying to get resolution over an improper listing, or just plain old getting reviewed in a timely manner.
One of my personal experiences with the DMOZ editors on their forums is cronicled here at http://resource-zone.com/forum/showthread.php?t=43425Â where I have asked for a category change.
The last comment on the forum for the request of a cat change comes from one of the site moderators and I quote…
“This isn’t the place to either request or justify category changes. You gave the benefit of your judgment when you first suggested the site. Now it’s up to the editor’s judgment.”
Like I said when I titled this blog post, still necessary, still hated. It would be refreshing to see Google quit using them all together.
July 23rd, 2007 at 3:55 pm
[…] There are basically 3 search engines (maybe 4) that you need to submit to, and 1 or 2 directories (if you can ever get a response from one of them). They will also submit your blog to several blog search engines. So, all you have to do is write […]