DMOZ – Time to kill it off?
This is a guest post by a current DMOZ editor. The author has been paid by searchengineoptimisation.org for this content. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of searchengineoptimisation.org.
I am writing this post about the current state of DMOZ, or “the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web” as they proclaim themselves to be. I believe time and technology has simply passed DMOZ by – its time to put it out to pasture, or drastically change the way in which it operates.
Outside of links for search engine spiders, the directory currently has zero use. If you want to hire a painter in your home town, would you go look up a dmoz category? Or would you use Google? By their own admission dmoz is horrendously out of date, so how can they possibly expect human users to gain any value from it?
One potential dmoz listing has been complaining he’s waited 10 years and is still not listed. Jimnoble (dmoz editor) says himself:
Visit the category where you believe your website should be listed and use the suggest URL link at the top of the page. Some volunteer will process your listing suggestion in time but we can’t predict who or when that might be. Elapsed times can range from a few days to a few years. There is no need to re-suggest your website and doing so could be counter-productive because a later suggestion overwrites any earlier one.
Pretty much an admission right there that the directory is a complete failure. How can they be of use to human users when great new sites can potentially take several years to get in, but can be in search engine results and showing in search queries within a day of launching?
As well as being a miserable failure when it comes to end users, the DMOZ staff also seem to want to create as poor a user experience as possible for people submitting websites too.
This quote from Mauri (who is a moderator on the forum) sums it up well:
No, because all submitters can easily know when their sites get listed, since they will appear on the public side of the directory.
If a site gets rejected, and this happens because our Guidelines say that’s not listable,
there is no valid or useful reason to inform the submitter of that decision.
The following reply by Cardchoices is perfectly correct:
Yes there is a useful reason for this. Lots of people out there will keep resubmitting their sites because they thought their sites had been turned down eventhough their sites have not yet been reviewed. Sequently, it’s a waste of time for both submitters and editors
Everything is already in place to send people an automated email saying they have been reviewed and rejected. What is there to gain (apart from lots of unwanted resubmissions) by making people wait and see?
With the current state of the DMOZ directory, pulling the plug on it and letting it die out might be the best thing for everyone concerned.
You can tell that the directory is a mess when a war veteran selling childs toys can’t get in after 6 months, yet there is a Domain brokerage company listed who are running front page ads on their site… selling dmoz listed domains that have been dropped and caught!
From the dmoz about page:
The web continues to grow at staggering rates. Automated search engines are increasingly unable to turn up useful results to search queries. The small paid editorial staffs at commercial directory sites can’t keep up with submissions, and the quality and comprehensiveness of their directories has suffered. Link rot is setting in and they can’t keep pace with the growth of the Internet.
This is simply not true – Best of the Web are a paid directory and are doing a far better job of keeping up with things than dmoz could ever hope to do.
These citizens can each organize a small portion of the web and present it back to the rest of the population, culling out the bad and useless and keeping only the best content.
I don’t even know where to start on the quote above, its wrong in so many different ways.
The Open Directory follows in the footsteps of some of the most important editor/contributor projects of the 20th century. Just as the Oxford English Dictionary became the definitive word on words through the efforts of volunteers, the Open Directory follows in its footsteps to become the definitive catalog of the Web.
Google is the only definitive catalog of the web in 2010. The only catalog dmoz is like is the 3 year old mail order catalog I’m currently propping up my old desk with – its about as out of date as it…
Given that the directory is useless for humans, the only possible reason to be an unpaid editor would be to either list your own sites, sabotage competitors, sell listings, or all of the above. With a pagerank 8 homepage and 7 million links pointing to it, its easy to see why listings are in demand from an seo perspective. Heres a screen shot of 5 listings I sold today to one buyer (click it to see the full size):
I know from speaking to friends who have managed to get into more lucrative pages to edit than me that some links have been bought and sold for significantly more than I have charged.
The thing is, all is not completely lost with DMOZ if the owners were willing to turn it around. It would only take one small change – charging a fee to have your website reviewed like Yahoo Dir and BOTW do.
DMOZ admin made the following comment:
Charging a fee and passing that on to volunteers would invite abuse (and given how the volunteer system is structured would be difficult to manage). And with payment, much of the value the directory has would be lost.
This is complete bullshit, as right now there is a massive incentive for abuse. From an editors point of view, there is no reason whatsoever to stay aboard this sinking ship for any reason outside of taking bribes – corruption is rampant across the full directory with the current business model.
If the payments to review your site went via official channels, this would wipe out 99% of the corruption overnight. If you were paying for a review that was guaranteed to be done within a week then the system would work perfectly. Right now if you submit a site, you don’t know if you just got a lazy editor, one who owns a competing site to you and will never give you the juicy link, a category owned by one of the many “pay to play” editors. Since you could potentially wait months/years there really isn’t any way to tell.
Nobody is going to pay for a link twice, so by charging officially it would completely kill the thriving black market for dmoz links. By guaranteeing a 3 or 7 day review, it would become obvious if someone wasn’t listing sites that they should be, and those editors could quickly be weeded out.
I cannot accept the argument of “And with payment, much of the value the directory has would be lost”. I would say the value has already been lost since high quality sites cannot get in the directory due to corruption, lazyness and the fact that the small number of editors who are honest are massively over worked.
Look at how much business BOTW, Business.com and the Yahoo Directory are doing and tell me how that wouldn’t work perfectly with this dying behemoth of a directory…
About the Author
18 Responses to “DMOZ – Time to kill it off?”
Leave a Reply
FrogsThemes.com Review
Looking for a new WordPress theme to use recently, we thought we’d review ...
5 Beginner SEO Steps and 10 Quality Dofollow Directories
What we want to look at today is something for anyone who has just produced a ne ...
CodeMyConcept.com Review
Since it was time to do another review, we decided this time it would be the tur ...
Obviously a small time editor by the way s/he referes to other editors. Also why would someone want to continue as an editor with this warped view?
The op talks about paying editors, that may or may not change the value of the directory, but it sure would loose many of its editors. This is our hobby, we collect and collate web sites. Would you collect stamps better or spend more time doing it if someone paid you a dollar a stamp? Or would that just take the fun out of it.
Site owners may not like the fact that we are all volunteers, we spend as much or as little time as we like on editing, we have families etc to spend time with too, so we fit our hobby into that and if the paid directors are so good and there are so many, why not just let DMOZ be DMOZ and work the way it was set up? If you want to pay for a review then sites like BOTW do a good job. But DMOZ is about hobbyists collecting links not a business, not out for profit and our service is to those who want to use our material to search the web. The op asks if you want a tradesman do you go to DMOZ, well I don’t know about others but I do and I build categories for others who want to do so too. If you don’t want to….fine, but some of us do wish to do that and DMOZ exists for them.
“Also why would someone want to continue as an editor with this warped view?”
Because its financially attractive to do so. I work as a freelance SEO (I obviously left that off my dmoz application). There is the obvious financial benefit of being able to sell listings – regardless of how poor the directory is from a user point of view, the links themselves are top quality links from an seo perspective – further helped by the fact so many other people syndicate the content.
“The op talks about paying editors, that may or may not change the value of the directory, but it sure would loose many of its editors. This is our hobby, we collect and collate web sites. ”
Okay, then if most of the editors feel that way, keep them on a voluntary basis (or let them nominate a charity for their payments to go to). Let them stay on a roaming basis, editing whatever categories interest them, whenever they feel like it.
Then have a smaller band of paid reviewers have targets of reviewing 5 sites per hour or something. Since they are paid employees they can be let loose only on categories that volunteers don’t want to edit or that have been abandoned for months/years.
I seen one editor saying in the forum something like “you couldn’t pay me enough money to edit a forex category” – thats fine if its a hobby for him, but a paid employee would happily clean that up, which would start to make the directory have a purpose for human users again.
Right now, going back to the painter example, if I wanted one I wouldn’t dream of going to dmoz as the chances are it could be an abandoned or corrupt category. I know Google doesn’t pick and choose which topics to deal with properly, so I go there. Mixing in paid editors would allow DMOZ to become a viable option again.
“But DMOZ is about hobbyists collecting links not a business, not out for profit and our service is to those who want to use our material to search the web.”
If its your hobby and you enjoy doing it would you not rather see it ran properly rather than going the way of the dinosaurs and becoming extinct, or at least going the way of the typewriter and becoming completely useless?
Charging even $10 per listing would surely make your job easier and more interesting – it would instantly remove all the duplicate submissions, made for adsense garbage and wrong category submissions. It would instantly put DMOZ back as the best directory on the web. Hell if you don’t want to profit from it just take off the operating costs and donate all the rest of the money from the submissions to a charity. I’m struggling to see a single negative point to turning it into a paid business model…
I’m an editor also, and its hard to argue with the points in this post. DMOZ under its current guise is just a big turd waiting to get flushed down the toilet.
I only wanted to edit because all my competitors had links on a great PR5 page and I couldn’t get in myself. Finally became an editor and deleted a competitors site, and added my own. As soon as Google spidered that category I moved up 3 spots and my competitor down 2 – putting me above him.
Since then I’ve deleted a few more competitors, and de-optimised some other ones anchor texts.
I didn’t really want to do this but felt I had no option. I didn’t realise how much people were selling links for though to be honest – I’m definitely going to look into doing this too
Is the post writer really a dmoz editor? Might not be true…
If true can you email me please…
The post writer is definitely a DMOZ editor. Since I was paying him to write the content, I asked him to tell me a random url which he would approve. He told me the url, and 5 minutes later it was listed.
“The post writer is definitely a DMOZ editor. Since I was paying him to write the content, I asked him to tell me a random url which he would approve. He told me the url, and 5 minutes later it was listed.”
I don’t believe you. You are just making this up to get some visitors to your website. Give real prove and we might think it to be real.
You can choose to believe me, or choose not to. Ultimately I can’t prove it absolutely without blowing the editors cover and having him fired.
What part of it makes it unbelievable? Do you not believe a large percentage of editors are not there for altruistic reasons, and are simply there for personal gain in one way or another?
I believe these people are editors about as much as I believe in the Tooth Fairy, although it’s possible they were editors who have since been removed for exactly the sort of abuse they like to claim goes undiscovered.
It is very easy indeed to claim anything at all on the internet, and hide behind ludicrous claims of “confidentiality”. Would anyone like to see all the gold medals I won at the last Olympic Games?
I could post a screenshot with all the details blocked out, if you like. But I promise they are mine, cross my heart.
I also have some very valuable Nigerian bank drafts here, ready to have your name filled in. Just let me have your bank details and I’ll get right to it …
The fact that you let him chose the URL to list appears suspicious, for one how do you know it wasn’t listed already? Or more seriously that he isn’t just a small time editor with a small category that duped you into paying him to write this story? To charge what he claims he does for listings he must have some wide ranging permissions. It appears like you didn’t properly check if that adds up with his claim.
soon all of the editors – Blekko will integrate DMOZ – and the junk will all be removed (quickly) with the report spam feature – then new editors will be excepted and ALL the old ones will be terminated (however allowed to reapply)
wanna Bet?
Johnny – “The fact that you let him chose the URL to list appears suspicious, for one how do you know it wasn’t listed already? ”
He told me what category he was going to edit. I asked him to tell me a url which was about to be approved, which he done. I checked and it wasn’t listed, then he added it.
Makrhod – “and hide behind ludicrous claims of “confidentiality””
How can you possibly say its ludicrous to use confidentiality? Any other guest poster has used their real name and linked to their website. Its pretty obvious what the outcome is going to be if this article was posted under the editors real name!
Canttellyou – I’ll take that bet, don’t see it happening at all.
What about the second part of my question?
So he can edit some small category and maybe duped you into paying him for a story. Did you check that his permissions add up to the claim he is making? Did you check out his profile?
Honestly that someone would pay $2000 for a listing in a directory that doesn’t generate any traffic just doesn’t seem likely. Or is it “throw away your money” week?
Go back and pick a categopry yourself Admin and ask the op to add a site there, or as said earlier if you know their editor name you can check there profile. It’s obvious to any editor that this guy does not know jack s*** about the director and is, as I said a small editor. That means any damage s/he can do is limited to a small number of categories, probably only one and even without an editor name will soon be discovered.
DMOZ editors to be paid, can I just reiterate why? There are plenty like BOTW that operate that model. Strange we are still the largest human edited and still used by Google and if anything you say is true still commanding a high price to delete competitors and people pay for links. Not bad for a failing product.
Truth is people would like to delete competitors, but it happens rarely and when it does it is very soon discovered and editor and all sites booted. Yes there are offers for editors to be bribed, but to be any real use one has to be an editall and that takes hours of work, showing real commitment, to throw it awa for a fistful of dollars, some are stupid enough and usuall caught fats with the same result for editor and sites. Toi get editall plus means real dedication and without any payment, (what good is someone who can only add your site to a bottom category?) then suddenly after years of voluntary work money becomes important? Gets more unlikely.
If you paid for that article you were robbed. Except as noted above you got a few more views because you posted a load of twaddle.
Johnny – I never said he had wide ranging editing abilities. In fact I think most people who are not playing by the rules are more likely to be smaller editors, although that is speculation on my part.
I’m not sure why you think I’ve been “duped”. I verified the fact he was an editor, and from looking at other things he showed me I am 100% certain that he has been selling links. I was never under any illusion that he could edit any category he chose.
You are completely failing to understand the seo benefits of backlinks if you are saying nobody would pay $400 per link just because no humans are going to visit them. Why are people buying links in old newspaper articles? Nobody is going to see them either, apart from search spiders – http://www.further.co.uk/blog/Express-Group-contacts-SEOs-to-sell-links-269
Anonymously – Like I said above, you are right that the damage this individual can do outside of his own small area of the directory is limited at best.
But when you have a lot of corrupt editors in the system, all these little areas of damage are adding up to something significant in total.
Personally I don’t think DMOZ should pay all editors, why throw away money when people are willing to do it for free? Charging for listings would allow a select group of editors to be paid, to deal with categories that nobody else wants. The amount I paid for the article was insignificant (far far less than he sold a single link for) but I just wanted to disclose that it was paid for.
I would agree that very little deletion of listings goes on, as it is going to be extremely hard to defend if someone calls you out on it and asks “why did you go in and delete something.com, its a high quality site and has been there for years” – you don’t really have a good answer to that.
But it has to be very easy to add paid listings and do so completely without detection, would you agree? I think its naive if anyone thinks most of the corrupted editors are being caught.
Regardless of the points, there does need to be a change. I have a family chocolate business that has been waiting 2 years for approval to get a listing. That’s ridiculous. If the processing time for this directory is to be so long and so large then it should lose it’s helpful ranking in the world order since it is favoring those who have been in their longer.
Everything in life needs some iterating and this system should go a) more open or more crowdsource, b) go paid like the rest w/ guarantees, or c) go away/go private/just become a human delicious..oh wait.
I have tried to get on there for five years once a year I submit in that section, thats my niche section, my competitors have seven listings each (how funny is that) I just want one, quite happy with one.
—- Quote from reply forum post —-
Some volunteer will process your listing suggestion in time but we can’t predict who or when that might be. Elapsed times can range from a few days to a few years. There is no need to re-suggest your website and doing so could be counter-productive because a later suggestion overwrites any earlier one.
—- Un Quote —-
If you cant get it together in one year you need to be out of there, really is laughable, whoreing page rank for your own needs, nee to go now, going to apply to be an editor
Could you email me. I’m having a hard time getting listed on dmoz. Any assistance would help. Hope to hear from you soon.
- S.E.
There is little doubt in my mind that what the author has written is true. It has been confirmed by so many different sources. My own experience has been a negative one I have to admit – been waiting over 2 years no and no peep. It’s interesting as my site lists property – specifically vacation rentals. I look on dmoz and see a competitor site up – not simply the homepage but the pages for some of its individual properties! How can that be so? It’s a clear breach of dmoz guidelines but it continues…..and guess what??? No competitor sites are being added.