Posts Tagged ‘DMOZ’

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As the debate over paid links continues to wage a lot of innocent business owners get caught in the crossfire. They often hear bits and pieces of information and then have to make decisions based on that information. Rarely is the average business owner as fully informed as the average SEO. Heck, even the average SEO is in the dark much of the time trying to parse statements and warnings made by the search engine representatives.

One of the areas of confusion that many have regarding paid links is knowing when a paid link is really a paid link, and when is a paid link penalized. I think a fair argument can be that a payment doesn’t necessarily always have to be monetary. Any quid pro quo on a link can legitimately be considered a “paid” link.

But not to worry, Google and the other engines don’t work that way. In fact, in their attempt to eliminate all forms of paid links from affecting their natural algorithmic search results Google has left one giant loophole in the paid link witch hunt: paid directory links.

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I have not talked much about our new link program here in this blog, however I posted what we are doing over at Search Engine Watch Forums and have gotten some good feedback, which has also raised some good points we have not considered. SEO Book also picked up on the thread which generated some additional comments.

In the course of our efforts we’ve also have been getting feedback from those we are trying to “convert” from the old “link page” format to the new article format. While mostly positive, some of the negative responses range from, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, link pages have always worked just fine,” to “You don’t know what you’re talking about, ALL reciprocal links are useless.” (I’m paraphrasing the responses.)

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I do a fair amount of griping about DMOZ with my major beefs being no way to track submissions and no sign if your submission was rejected, misplaced, rerouted or just sitting in purgatory for review. DMOZ bashing can be an art for some and so can the backlash from editors. Personally, I always tried to be realistic, offering constructive criticism and hoping that editors will take my genuine concerns, as well as others, seriously.

A couple of months back we changed our business name and URL, and began the process of changing links and whatnot. On my things-to-do list is to request listing changes at each of the major directories. I’m putting that off until we complete a re-working of our site which will be rolling out a bunch more services. Waiting to make the change will allow me to put together a more accurate description for all the services we will be offering.

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DMOZ (ODP – Open Directory Project) is closing down their site submission status request forum.

Our feedback indicates that the information we are giving out really is not a practical help in the vast majority of cases.

Huh. So finding out if your submission has been moved to a different category, lost, misplaced or rejected is not a practical help?

Unfortunately, this means that when there are fewer editors who are active here they naturally feel obliged to do even more work than we should expect of volunteers who ought to be spending their time editing anyway.

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About Search Directories

Many of you are already familiar with Yahoo, the most popular search directory, but are not familiar with the other major directories and/or the difference between a directory and a search engine.

I’ll tackle the latter first. A directory works very much like a phone book. Web site owners submit their sites into a specific directory category. Web surfers click through the directory categories (i.e. Business, Education, News) to find a number of sub-categories that they will have to click through to narrow down their search. When they get to the sub-category that best pertains to their search, all the web sites that fit in that category are listed, usually in alphabetical order.

Generally, all directories allow you to search as you would with a typical search engine, however the results provided will not be from the web, but rather only those sites that have already been included in the directory. When a search is performed the directory will usually display additional results of sites found outside of its own database, but they will only be listed AFTER all of their directory sites. If your site has not been submitted and included in one or all of the major search directories then there is little chance that you will receive any top listings for your keywords when searches are performed from those directories.

The Big 3 Search Directories

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