For those of you who don’t know, DMOZ is an older directory that used to be a staple point of every good search engine optimization strategy. Well, it was recently pointed out to me that Google is referencing DMOZ listings again. See an example below.
Here we can see a call out next to the listing for this site. The call out references a link from DMOZ.
Here we see it again if we do a search for the brand name.
When I clicked on the link, it took me to this page on DMOZ. Here we can see the product listed on the page.
Now we know that Wikipedia has been losing traffic and Google is looking for other sites to fill the void. Perhaps Google is looking to other properties for information and authority. Either way, this new development has SEO professionals looking at DMOZ again. Are you an editor? Time to find that old login and sign back in.
If you are looking to submit your site to DMOZ, you can do that here. Full credit for this find goes to Dara Greaney from BuyAutoParts.com, who tipped me off during a call.
I think this clearly shows that curated filtering for Google is something they are working on. DMOZ had a very nice (old) product but did not evolve with the new social networking and did not maintain a high quality directory. Problems with DMOZ are that they do show and tell visitors who is making the ranking and the listing. For you as a merchant you don’t have any influence of being placed on one of their lists. So visitors also don’t know why the lists are there.
The biggest problem Google is trying to solve with DMOZ is that similar search within Google does not really work. You can’t really get a good comparison list of companies or services within the same field. The google algorithm is just not capable of getting this information correct.
ZEEF.com is building an new directory model based on content curation: https://ignitevisibility.com/is-dmoz-making-a-comeback-for-seo-new-sighting/
This model combines all the best wold’s of social and competition and expertise. We show ranked list with the curator (expert) and we let curators compete on topics. Topics with high knowledge factor are best suited but also simple comparisons are possible on the platform. Compare pages like: https://java.zeef.com/jan.beernink and https://java.zeef.com/chandra.sekhar or a more simple subject as http://cycling.zeef.com.
The use by Google of DMOZ shows that the need a different approach to search. People how know SEM are creating to much clutter within the search index. This problem is going to increase in time and Google has no real answer for this jet.
For more info contact me on ZEEF.com
Klaas Joosten
Klaas, You make some great points here. Thanks for the comment. I feel as though these lists should be revived and used as ranking factors, just as before, if the spam can be kept down.
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Finally I get to see all these terms here. I have spent more than an hour browsing the web to look for good information about dmoz.