Getting a site listed in DMOZ
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 are a lot of claims, discussion and poor understanding in webmaster forums as to if a DMOZ listing even helps. There is also a lot of discussion about editors favouring their own sites and corruption as DMOZ. 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 set out to find good sites to list. To find sites, the use their knowledge of the area; they follow links on other sites; they use search engines; or they use things like the print media. 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. You often see the comment from DMOZ editors about the overall poor quality of sites that are submitted, so some editor do not look at them and use other sources to find sites. 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 light of this, is it worth suggesting 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 go about to 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. You are better of spending your time finding 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. Resubmitting your site will not get you listed (a resubmission just overwrites the previous one with the new date). Emailing the editor of a category editor will not help (editors do not like do special favours on request). Submit your site once and move on to more productive activities. It will either get listed or it won’t. 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.
