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Home::Online Promotion
Raise Your Hands If You Are Frustrated With DMOZ!
Author : Melih Oztalay
If you ever had the pleasure of trying to submit your website to
DMOZ (also know as the Open Directory Project - ODP) you
probably found the process frustrating and riddled with certain
arrogance and a lack of communication. Yet, it is one the more
important directories for listing your website. You cannot help
but wonder if this directory is there to assist website owners
for mutual success or purposely trying to become an antagonistic
netizen resource!
DMOZ is a web directory which was originally created in 1998 by
employees of Sun Microsystems. The directory was sold to
Netscape which is now part of AOL/Time Warner. They supposedly
have over 5.2 million sites listed, over 71,000 editors, in over
590,000 categories. These statistics are hard to believe if you
think of the frustrating process to get your site listed - IF
you are so lucky. One would almost have to believe many of these
sites were actually grandfathered. Certainly in the past 3 years
listing your site or becoming an editor for a specific category
has been a nightmare.
The importance of DMOZ has increased despite the Internet trend
of using search engines to locate websites faster than
navigating through a multitude of categories in a web directory.
One value that has been closely associated with the ODP is
Pagerank, which is a value Google places on web pages. One of
the most important factors that will raise your website's
Pagerank with Google is the number of inbound links to your
website and the Pagerank value of those linking web pages. This
directory is important not only because it is a great web
directory, but because many search engines adopted it as a de
facto directory due to the ease of importing the whole directory
data and reusing it as their own. Google's own web directory is
based on that of the ODP. The estimated number of web sites that
use this directory are not known, but it can be argued to be in
the thousands. AOL Search is certainly one of the many resources
that use the ODP. This number translates to a huge number of
inbound links to websites listed in the directory. This alone
makes this directory very important to any serious webmaster in
their internet marketing strategy, contrary to what the editors
may say in their public forums.
Having a very valuable Directory at their disposal, the editors
have a great deal of power at their finger-tips and the
arrogance is quite evident. There is an attitude of take it or
leave it expressed at the forums. Many webmasters depend on
their websites for a living and hence they try to market their
websites with everything available to them in order to ensure a
steady stream of income. Whether these websites are successful
is dependent upon if they are listed within a great resource
like the ODP. It becomes hard to accept that an editor has so
much power as to determine the financial fate of a business.
There are many stories and complaints about DMOZ. The most
important one is undoubtedly the lack of communication to
webmasters. There is no formal method to let a webmaster know if
the listing was accepted or declined, and if it was declined
what the related issues may be in order to correct them. Let us
take for instance ZEAL. Zeal's editors have a great method of
communicating to you any issue related to your submissions. You
know exactly what the problem is with your listing and you have
a chance for corrections by communicating with the editors.
Unfortunately for the commercial community, Zeal is only good
for non-commercial purposes. If one could use this format from
Zeal at the ODP, the complaints and frustrations would be
greatly reduced.
The list of complaints regarding DMOZ is fairly substantial and
include the manner in which the editors run the directory, the
refusal to listen to suggestions for improvements, their lack of
sensitivity to webmasters, the length of time it takes to review
a website (even though they supposedly have thousands of
editors), and their inability to use current technologies to
better control and run the directory while minimizing abuse.
Let us take for example a direct quote from a frustrated
webmaster that asked to become an editor. Mel Atwood is
respected as a top Multi-Level Marketing Consultant and founded
YourSolutionsNet, LLC in 1997 to provide solid MLM Solutions.
"DMOZ is focused on providing a directory edited by real people;
however, for many key words an average person has no expertise
in judging the value of one site over another. For example: MLM
Software is a particularly important key word phrase for my
website. Having submitted my site for this key word on several
occasions, it appears they are overwhelmed with managing all
categories and have been unable to list my site. In this
particular category example there are 10 websites listed for MLM
Software, a perfect category for a new volunteer editor. So, I
applied. I was told that my application to become an editor was
rejected because I was also interested in listing my site in the
category, a site I might add that is extremely relevant to this
category is SimpleMLMSoftware. It dawned on me, how do they
expect to secure volunteers of any professional nature for a
particular category if they reject them on the basis of also
wanting to include their own site in the category they are
experts in? The quandary: they can't get enough editors to
quickly and efficiently get sites listed, and they won't accept
professionals to do the editing because an expert might also
want to list their site in that category. Ultimately that leaves
them with unskilled, inexperienced, and unprofessional editors
for a category. Thus, editors with no experience regarding a
category are evaluating what sites should and should not be
allowed. I fail to see how this improves relevance in searching
a key word or category. Yet to my dismay; Yahoo, Google, and AOL
along with other search engines see DMOZ's directory as highly
relevant. I've got to be missing something!" There have been
many suggestions to the directory and its editors. Most have
been dismissed as unworkable, or too much of a burden on the
directory and its army of editors to handle. They forget that
they have a lot of responsibilities to the general web users and
webmasters. The editors will claim the directory is here to
serve the public and not the webmasters, yet the webmasters are
the ones who make the content available to the Internet and
their content is what the public is seeking.
While we can certainly carry on with more frustrating stories
about DMOZ, let's focus our attention on suggestions for
improving the ODP process.
First and foremost, a method of communicating with the
webmaster and an opportunity to correct any problems with their
listing.
Secondly, set expectations that will inform webmasters how
long it is taking to process listings within a certain category.
Perhaps there is an editor who is truly inundated and is unable
to keep up with the listings in a reasonable time (within 30
days). Just like customer service phone systems can now tell you
how long you will be on hold, we can certainly measure date of
submission to date of response to determine length of time. This
may actually help the ODP to identify problem category editors
and provide methods of assisting them.
A third improvement would be implementing a system of better
control over editors and their power in accepting and rejecting
websites, especially those that directly compete with the
editor's own websites or websites that are affiliated with the
editor.
For the moment, this webmaster has no intention of continuing to
battle with the DMOZ editors and is certainly not recommending
his clients to journey through this frustrating process. There
are enough other methods of marketing websites on the web and if
the ODP was no longer available it certainly would not cause any
significant damage to the web or the public searching for
information. If webmasters banded together in a boycott of the
ODP, I believe someone would eventually listen. Don't you think
so?
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