It's a large directory owned by AOL and run largely by volunteers. There's a school of thought that being listed there will cause money to rain from the sky. It's probably untrue .
It is also free to suggest a site to it - that's the up-side. It seems to be one of the directories that Google has not yet banned from its calculations, indeed the Google directory (which recently seems to be updating once a month) is a mirror of the ODP. The downside is that there is no review feedback process to say whether the site has been accepted, rejected or is still awaiting review. Editors are all unpaid volunteers, and there is no predication of when a particular suggestion will be reviewed. If those make it worth spending the couple of minutes to suggest a site to it, then please go ahead. But accept the downsides, please. It's a fact of net-life.
It use to be the directory that everyone flocked to for their dreams all to come true. A listing in there made your site look worth more than it was. That was a while ago, now DMOZ has been devalued by most with many rumors of bribed editors and other internal problems. The link is not as valued as it once was and people have had to wait months and sometimes longer just for the chance to get listed. If you want to submit and forget than that is fine. However, I would not put that much value in it because it is not worth all the hype.
allout, you are correct - the hype that is thrown around about the power of a listing in the ODP is vastly over-estimated. It's just a link. Personally, I doubt it's because of the rumours, but that is the stuff of speculation, and pundits and bloggers love that stuff.
The real problem with the ODP is they shoot themselves in the foot. I can go in and submit my site 10 times on the same day. Wouldn't it make sense to implement a system which only allows one submission - if its still in the queue, reject the new submission, until either a) it is activated or b) it is rejected. Thus, editors could stop complaining about having too much work to do. Just my 2 cents.
A better solution would be to indicate to the submitter that their site was submitted on dd/mm/yyyy do you wish to amend the submission etc. Of course that would require a login or reference id mechanism.
High PR. Usually only accepting strong sites when not paying for a premium listing. I hold both DMOZ and JAYDE very highly. - As soon as i was accepted in both, my SERP results improved dramatically with google. It was no coincidence either.
OK, I misread this and just in case others do - the ODP/DMOZ does not have paid premium listings. Just wanted to clarify.
I thought they did. Well anyway they don't accept weak sites. So that has to say something about there SERP strength. Its a measure to see whether your site is strong or not, whether DMOZ Accepts. I was lucky enough that a few of my sites got accepted last week.
My clarification was just in case anyone read Alucard's comment as anything other than pointing out that we do not have paid premium listings, he was commenting only on the comment made by you joey112.....and therefore I commented that we do not have paid listings in any form, premium or not.
Well even if you don't have paid listings. Its still going to be powerful with SERP rankings. Its going to hold a lot of juice. Premium or not, DMOZ is powerful, especially with google not so much with yahoo or msn. Does that answer the question mate?
Many debate on here debate the value of a link, I hope it helps webmasters but that is not my primary intention in working as an editor, but I was just underlining that the directory is absolutely free to any of its listings, that one cannot buy a link and maybe that is why it is held by some important high rollers as worthy.
As an editor. What are the requirements for a site to be accepted? Does it have to be powerful enough. One of my sites was originally rejected a few times. Then once it got successful, 20 000 backlinks. Ranked well in google. It got accepted. ?