Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

Hi AriRose,

The Open Directory Project (DMOZ) is developed and maintained by a huge community of volunteer editors across the globe, and as you know it is free to submit.

This "volunteer" and "free" are most likely the reason it is taking so long for you to see your listing. The time between submission and approval or rejection can easily take months, and in some cases it has taken many, many months depending on the volume of submissions, category, etc.

You will hear that Search Engines continue to place less importance on general directory inbound link relationships, so there is some debate how valuable they will be as inbound links in the future. But for now it is still important to be listed with them mainly because:

1) DMOZ is free (and Yahoo! is not)
2) Google does use DMOZ as the basis for their directory
3) There is no negative impact for submitting
4) DMOZ is the biggest, most comprehensive human-edited directory on the Web.

As mentioned, it may take many, many months (it has taken a year or more in some cases) to be approved (or rejected) by DMOZ.

I would keep checking and not just by using the search function, you need to also go to the category you requested listing in.

Normally you should wait about half a year or so to resubmit and it is not recommend to keep resubmitting because this can further delay (or worse, block) getting listed.

I hope that helps - good luck.

Dear Ari

DMOZ is a directory listing site and by listing yourself on it, you enhance the rankings your site gains with the search engines. As it is an open project in association with AOL, I would expect it to take some time to have your listing vetted and approved. What category did you want to put it under?

As to it being necessary, it’s just a link amongst other links. Some sites are better to link from than others and any hyper-link which is named CPEhr rather than being simply the URL address will count for more. There’s a neat little article on this in Fresh Business Thinking at:

https://www.freshbusinessthinking.com/articles.php?AID=150&Title=Search+Eng...

You will find though that the optimisation of your web presence to the search engines is best achieved via an organic process. You can either pay someone such as a SEO consultant to hit everything possible at once or you can follow the rules you’ll find on Yahoo, Google and so on, to do the work yourself. Few SEO companies offer guaranteed results and none guarantee results such as a “Top 10 Google Ranking” for more than a month, unless you pay them to be on top of your ranking all the time.

We are doing the SalesVision website promotion organically.

www.salesvisiononline.com/html/reporting.aspx



It’s slow but it is working. Whoops! There I go, plonking my links to our website on everyone’s forums. All I’ve got to do now is to get UK managers as interested in our product as US ones are!

Best wishes


Steve Alekr

I'm going to post an answer that most may not agree with. I don't feel DMOZ is that important to rankings. Maybe it used to be, but not anymore.

Here is my advice. Add yourself to DMOZ once and then forget about it. Move on and start adding yourself to paid directories that can provide a trusted link. Here is an article I wrote on directory submissions for SEO and it contains links to the best directories to submit to, in my opinion.

Then begin building or buying links on sites that can actually provide you traffic as well as ranking. I wrote a blog post on my SEO blog to help you find the perfect link.

It takes little effort to submit a listing to ODP. So I would do it. Google likes to crawl DMOZ. It probably values DMOZ than many other directories because of the human editing.

The problem with DMOZ is that it is human edited. They may not have enough (or any!) humans in a specific category to keep up. There are other issues.

Read the submission guidelines very carefully: https://dmoz.org/add.html. Perhaps your site is not meeting their requirements (IE 300 other sites have already pretty much covered the bases you are attempting to cover). It may help to read the "Editing Guidelines" found here: https://dmoz.org/guidelines/ Larning their process may help you to understand why your site is not being selected.

Also, there is a wealth of info here: https://www.resource-zone.com/
This is the dmoz forum.

https://www.resource-zone.com/forum/faq.php
This is the FAQ - Probably more useful initially than any other page.

If they don't list your site then check this out:
https://www.resource-zone.com/forum/faq.php?faq=faq_site_questions#faq_wait

Please not that the above link is not going to work properly if you click on it. I suggest you copy the entire link and paste it into your browser. The profs software is not recognizing all of the link.

This explains it all.

I hope this helps.

-Greg Hill

First and foremost, Don't Pay - Do it yourself and understand the methodology while learning. I would suggest to start by subscribing to SEO Newsletters. If you don't already, start with the 'Guru' of SEO at: bruceclay.com. Here is a good starting page: https://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/qst_question.asp?qstID=18395

I hope this will help!