Dmoz - seven weeks and counting

Published on December 15th, 2006 by Jeremy Chatfield

Dmoz, the publicly maintained human moderated directory operated by AOL/Netscape, has been dead in the water for about seven weeks. It is now using a frozen copy of the database so that users can at least get to stable parts of the directory.

It’s beginning to cause anguish amongst the SEO-ers. Why?

DMOZ, the ODP and Yahoo

DMOZ (also known as the Open Directory Project) is amongst the earliest large scale human moderated directories and the largest free one. The other human moderated biggie being Yahoo’s directory started wayyyyyyy back when the web first got really going, somewhere around 1994. DMOZ has entered the lore of SEO as one of the places you must be listed. Over on the DMOZ blogs they are pretty dismissive about the concerns of SEO-ers. Why this disjunction between the two groups?

If you have a DMOZ listing, it is preferred by Google. So if you see a bizarre description of your site that you can’t find on any pages in your site, it probably comes from DMOZ. But DMOZ is now static - there will be no changes possible for an unknown time.

Easily resistable force meets immovable object

Fortunately, there is an answer - fix up the meta tags on your web pages to offer “NOODP”. This will cause SE’s (Google was the first I believe, around July 2006) to ignore DMOZ and use their other snippet-finders to describe your page.

NOODP doesn’t fix the other anguish that fledgling SEO’s find - the sense that being missed from DMOZ is like having one leg sawn off, while being forced to run a marathon. But a DMOZ listing isn’t that spectacularly important for rank. Only the description. And frankly, some of the descriptions are barking. Human moderated they may be… but that doesn’t make them perfectly correct. There was a great article I was going to reference about how becoming a category editor would let you play with competitors. Directing traffic to different inner pages and slightly tweaking the wording, bumping the listing to a different category and so on. I lost it. It was very funny and I promise I’ll reference it when I can find it again.

Anyway, a barking mad entry is how this posting topic came up. Trying to fix an entry for a client that has a number 1 position, reasonable snippet and the correct URL, but bizarrely, the name of a competitor company as the title. Turns out to have been DMOZ. Smack in the NOODP directive and within a day or two the title and description was taken from the web sites’ metatags. Phew.