Happy Birthday DMOZ! Are You Relevant Again?
If you aren’t familiar with DMOZ, you might want to brush up on your Internet marketing history, culture, and traditions 101. The Open Directory Project is only the oldest human-edited directory in existence and has probably twice as many enemies as they have friends. And they have a lot of friends.
DMOZ has been the subject of much controversy in the last few years because what used to take a couple of weeks (approval for a listing in the directory) now takes six months to a year. It used to be that getting listed in DMOZ was very important for a webmaster because almost all of the search engines crawled DMOZ and took information from the directory to index their sites. Google has always relied heavily upon DMOZ and still does.
The problem lately, however, has been its growth. Because it isn’t a for-profit institution, it is all volunteer run, and DMOZ gets a ton of applications from websites every day, it takes awhile to get listed. Many webmasters have quit submitting their websites altogether.
On today’s DMOZ blog, however, I found this promise from long-time DMOZer Bob Keating:
In keeping with the successes of the past 10 years, the future of DMOZ is as an information provider rather than a destination site. We will be enhancing to service to become more of a 21st century web service and simplify the integration of DMOZ data in other resources and applications, by creating “mashups”. For example if you maintain an informational site about gardening, you can use DMOZ to get you a list of hand-picked gardening sites to point your readers too, or if you are a hockey fan you can make a little widget on your blog to show hockey clubs in your local region. Stay tuned and please share your feedback here on the blog. We’ll be sharing more information here in the next month or so and appreciate your thoughts.
That’s a strong assertion. I commend DMOZ for putting together a plan for making itself relevant again. If this is followed through on then DMOZ could very well make itself one of the most important sites again. A link from DMOZ used to mean legitimacy for a webmaster. But these days you are more likely to meet with success long before you get that all-important DMOZ link, so it isn’t quite as important any more. The DMOZ of the future could make the directory more important than it ever has been, but for different reasons.
The mashups are a good idea. And it will likely mean that DMOZ will pick up new website applications from people who had written it off as irrelevant. It will also mean that webmasters can add credible information on their sites about other sites within their niches. I can hardly wait to see what this looks like.
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Tags: back links, DMOZ, Internet marketing, search engines