Rons How to I-Marketing

DMOZ or the Open Directory Project is the largest directory of websites with almost 5 million sites listed. The directory is owned by Netscape, which is owned by AOL. It is run by a large army of volunteers who see what they are doing as a hobby. Most webmasters are keen to have their site listed in this directory as they, rightly or wrongly, assume that getting a website listed in DMOZ is helpful to the search engine ranking of the site. There is a lot of discussion in webmaster forums as to if a DMOZ listing is beneficial. On these webmaster forums there is a lot of discussion of corruption, of editors favouring their own sites and sabotaging their competitors sites. Debating these real or imagined issues is not helpful as it will not influence if a webmasters site gets listed or not.

Most of the problems debated on webmaster forums are rooted in this different outlokk of what webamsters want and what DMOZ aims to provide. What webmasters want is a free listing service for their website. What DMOZ is building is a categorized collection of websites that are unique. To achieve these aims, the editor will go to a category that they have an interest in and want to do some work on. They then go about finding sites that are worthy of a listing. To find sites, the use their knowledge of the area; they follow links on other sites already listed; they use the search engines such as Google; or they use things like the print media such as newspaper advertisements. To hel the editor find sites to build a category, DMOZ allows the public (which includes webmasters) to suggest websites that might be suitable for the category. DMOZ editors often comment that the submitted sites are the worse source, so that is why many editors avoid them and use the other sources. Webmasters have an expectation that their suggested sites will be reviewed in a timeframe that they expect. DMOZ editors do not see that as their job (or hobby). With these conflicting expectations, there are going to be a lot of complaints on webmaster forums from those who’s sites are not getting listed after submitting. At the end of the day, the directory is DMOZ’s and they run it the way they want to and not they way webmasters want them to.

In the context of all these issues, should you still submit a site to DMOZ? It is, as it does not take long and you have to view the suggestion as nothing more than a another way to bring your site to an editors attention. Even though some editors ignore the suggested sites, others do at least browse the pool of suggested sites looking for gems that might be able to be listed. How do you get a site listed in DMOZ? To get an editors attention, you need to have an outstanding site that offers something that the currently listed sites do not offer (otherwise why would they want to list it?); you need to write a perfect guideline compliant title and description (this is a great way to get an editors attention as most other titles and descriptions of submitted sites are full of marketing hype); then submit once to the one best category.

Once you have submitted, then you can do nothing more to influence the listing or not of your site. Rather than keep checking DMOZ or complaining, your energy and time is better spent on other ways to promote your site. As there is nothing more that can be done, you are just wasting your time. Posting in webmaster forums to complain is not going to make any difference to getting your site listed. Repeatedly submitting a site will not get it listed and quicker as it just overwrites the previous submission with the new date. Contacting the categories editor will not help (editors do not do special favours on request). Submit your site and move on. The site will get reviewed eventually and may or may not get listed. A listing in DMOZ will not shoot your site to the top of the search engines and it is still easy to rank a site well without a DMOZ listing. Understanding DMOZ is a better option to complaining about it, as it will get you anywhere.

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