Why do search engines take DMOZ links so seriously?
Take one look through any DMOZ section and you’ll see a list of laughably outdated links, often failing to include even the most active websites/communities in the niche. I see a lot of sections plagued with dead Angelfire/free-host websites, artifacts from the late 1990s, that now sit at considerably high authority for what they are.
Is this not an obvious failure of the DMOZ system? Is a cliquish group of editor competitors locking your site out the most beneficial relevance model? What about waiting months for a listing when your website is the premier authority in the niche? However, I’d like to place less emphasis on the latter two questions and more emphasis on the first.
Note: I’m not crying about getting a link rejected, nor do I not recognize the value of having your website in the directory. This is a serious question that challenges the rationality of the DMOZ paradigm. Interested in hearing any thoughts.
It is still of some importance as there are many directories that used the DMOZ database and populate results from the open directory project and so does Google.
What happens here is that the link popularity increases and so does the chances of the categories listed in those directories coming up in SERPs.
This definitely does help in getting some link benefit as well.
Yeah well when I say “heard” I mean “read”. I read about it, numerous times. There are reports of it everywhere, but I’m guessing you know that.
Have you not noticed that no one ever produces any evidence to back up that?What about the credibility of those who make up allegations and claims and never produce anything to back that up. What about the credibility of those who just repeat the claims in public forums without actually checking they are true. Have you not noticed that no one ever produces any evidence to back up their claims? What does that say about credibility?
Can you show us the evidence to back up your claim or are you just making it up too?
So there’s plenty of discussion about it, enough for me to form my opinion of Dmoz and question their credibility.
What evidence do you require to question the credibility of Dmoz? Or are you satisfied that everyone is just “making it up”, like you suggest I’m doing?
Totally agree, but I just do not understand why posters like the one above continue to make claims up for. Its just a good link to have, nothing more and there are a lot of other ways to get good links.
Directories like DMOZ ceased to be considered to be so important quite a few years ago.
It is true that they were important ten years ago when search engines were in their infancy and needed to use directories to gauge the relevance of pages but that ceased to be necessary a long time back.
You ‘heard’ that? Have you not noticed that no one ever produces any evidence to back up that?
lost all credibility in my mind.
What about the credibility of those who make up allegations and claims and never produce anything to back that up. What about the credibility of those who just repeat the claims in public forums without actually checking they are true. Have you not noticed that no one ever produces any evidence to back up their claims? What does that say about credibility?
Can you show us the evidence to back up your claim or are you just making it up too?
Once I heard reports about DMOZ category editors holding site owners to ransom for their links, that directory lost all credibility in my mind. So hopefully search engines feel the same way about them.
These days i haven’t heard alot of this DMOZ directory… its not that big deal today… your site can still rank well even without it… DMOZ is a human edited and they having hard time handling the number of site considering its too popular…
Search engines no longer put as much weight on a link included in DMOZ as they used to.
The reason they were held in such esteem is that they were manually reviewed, the description was verified and the site checked for relevance to the topic.
Search engine algorithms have practically caught-up in terms of validating the content, intent, value, authority, relevance and such of most sites now.