The guy who will visit every website on DMOZ

So ok, I will be visiting every website and category in DMOZ, at least within the uppermost Business category. I decided that since I'm going to visit every website, why not post my findings on an unofficial DMOZ forum where editors and visitors can read about my journey.

Why am I doing this you might ask? I'm not doing this because I'm a DMOZ whore and like spending all my time looking at DMOZ. I'll be looking for some link love, marketing and publicity from the sites listed in DMOZ. This is not a thread about me complaining. In fact, I am happy about the quality of DMOZ for the long term project I am doing rather than manually searching for sites on Google.

I will spend an hour or two every day, more or less when I have free time to view the sites and get to work. This will probably go on for a very long time (at least as long as it pays off). I will add posts to this thread only about interesting finds, or questionable categories. I know metas and editors don't have the time to look at every single thing in there. So I'll just post whatever and you can read it if you feel like it. Some stuff may be nonsense, others may actually be important. I know editors and metas have a lot of pride in keeping the directory clean and I may be able to help in this regard as well, since I will go through the entire thing myself anyways. This will just be a "take it or leave it" type of thread. I will post as often as I find stuff or just an update at where I am in DMOZ (alphabetically) every once in awhile.

Last but not least, if you find my findings to be helpful or interesting, check out the site in my signature. I would appreciate a meta or editor to manually add it to DMOZ if it meets the standards, as a gesture. If this thread is somehow deleted, I will start a similar one on my own forum (the site in my signature), although there will be less people there. Any link love and publicity (to site in my signature) would also be appreciated!

Enjoy
Best

 

Update:

I am currently located at: http://www.dmoz.org/Business/Accounting/Firms/Accountants/New_Zealand/ in the DMOZ directory.

As in a different thread, I mentioned that this category has about 100 sites and descriptions that are very similar or in some cases exactly the same. They have different contact information though. We'll just see if some guy writes back and complains that I sent 100 emails to him.

 

I would like to know about your research work

 

Sounds very interesting, snappingpig. One thing about topical listings is that if you have a hundred machine shops making widgets and they all use the same type of equipment, it can be challenging to write different descriptions for them. Especially when you're limited to 2 or 3 sentences and you want to describe two things, subject & content, rather than the advertisement that most businesses prefer to have as a description.

An ad in a newspaper or magazine, which most of us are used to writing (businessmen), is not the same thing as a description for a website on the Internet. A viewer needs to know what is this website, and what would I find there should I choose to visit it. Those are the two questions editors attempt to answer in a description, though sometimes the title, itself will answer the first question, and more space can be used to describe the content of the site.

Unique content for the category could be anything, and it varies from category to category. It's really a judgement call by the editor. Familiarity with the subject is helpful for an editor, but, not absolutely necessary, it's more important to get familiar with the category and what's in it. Editors pick up this kind of knowledge and experience by editing in wide areas of the Directory, and learning the little idiosyncraties of each area.

 

Well said crowbar...glad to see you're back.

 

Thanks, attick. The other thing I forgot to mention is the scope of the category. Any time a category is created, you have to look at the whole Directory, and not just one small area of it, because what you may want to create could already exist in another Topical tree.

In those cases, you would send the sites to that category, and just put a relcat (related category) link in the category pointing to that other category. The Directory is really a giant spider web of links and cross links. Most of these links go up or down, but some of them go sideways.


What you might think would logically fit in one category, might not be the case, for a variety of reasons. It's usually very helpful to check the category description by going to the page and clicking on "Description" up in the right hand corner. It tells you the type of sites that are accepted there, and often points to other possible categories.

 

I hope you can give us some great suggestions after your visit.

 

The first thing you need to understand is that editors serve a different audience than you do, so SEO is not of any interest to them.

Submitters do have a big problem, in that they have no voice, no rights, and no influence on the Directory or it's editors, and rightfully feel very enraged and powerless at what seems to be a very poor service of their own needs.

And they are absolutely right, it is a poor service, and that's because they assume and expect something that the Directory can't and doesn't supply.

So, I guess my first and most important suggestion is for all of you to change your mindset about that. Do not expect something that's not provided, it only leads to frustration. Once you've accepted that, then your mind will be open to any suggestions editors can give you.

Editors love to help people in any way they can, because they like to demonstrate their editing knowledge and they like the feeling they've given you something to assist you.

The problem is you ask for things we aren't allowed to do at this time. To break the rules means losing editing privleges and a trust that's taken a long time to build up. That trust is very important to an editor, and even to ex-editors, like myself. You don't want to let down people you've worked with for years.

The overriding factor is what is best for the Directory and its editors in their task of serving web surfers. Everything else is secondary, and when it interferes with or diminishes our capabilities, or threatens security, it's off the table (unless a new method can accommodate both).

I suspect you will see new features popping up to help submitters, but those things need resources and a lot of careful consideration before they can be implemented in such a huge project.

This is just my personal opinion, I have no right to speak for anyone, and my knowledge is limited.

My second suggestion. If you want to get noticed, send in ODP compliant titles/descriptions and to the most correct category you can find, when you submit a site suggestion. That will get it noticed.

I would also say that the more unique content you can provide on the site, the better. I know that it's hard to pin down exactly what that is, because it's often different for different categories, but if other sites in that category don't have it, or it's something personal about the site or business owner, it's most likely going to be considered unique content by the editor.

A few examples might be the personal community activities of a real estate agent, biographies, the credentials/experience of the person, one of a kind items (like a water garden someone has built and designed themselves, the art work of an artist, original songs a band has written, a service no one else offers, ect).

The list is endless, and oftentimes quite simple. What we don't want is ten sites with the exact same cookie cutter information that every other of the ten has. Why would a surfer want to see the same thing ten times, they wouldn't.

 

LOL.

That was the funniest thing I have heard in long time. thanks for a good laugh.

 

With the exception of editors who are SEOs in RL, the reason most editors aren't interested is that it has nothing to do with the job of editing. (other than completely deleting a list of keywords sent in as a description, and rewriting the whole thing).

What makes you think otherwise?

If you have any evidence that an editor, who is a webmaster or SEO, is abusing his privleges, please fill out an abuse form. Just make sure you understand the guidelines well enough to know what real abuse is. Not listing your particular sites probably wouldn't be abuse, but good editing, .

 

lol yeah, I noticed pretty quick about the related categories and getting lost, but I figured out how to stay in an alphabetical pattern by looking at the status bar and checking, just to keep my quest organized.

It seems to me that a lot of the sites so far that I've went to actually didn't have great SEO. It was almost like they don't even know what SEO is. I probably forgot that not every webmaster is interested in SEO or even knows what it is, at least that's how I was when I first started. Some sites probably saw DMOZ as just another way to putting their site up in a directory rather than pagerank reasons, possibly without even knowing that DMOZ is probably the biggest one out there.

Man, some of those old and crappily designed logos and 1996 graphics remind me of the old days of my web design lol. I'm starting to recognize two major types of webmasters out there. The ones like DP who make a site for 100% of their earnings (really nice sites) and the others who just have it up as a pamphlet or small side to their business that earns 0% or very small earnings (ugly sites). I've seen mostly land based businesses here with boring designs. Altho I am only in the accounting section so what do you expect lol!

 

Well said

 

This sounds interesting but it might be better presented as a blog as blogs started out as a journal.

Also you might use a link checker package to snag a list of links within a section of the directory so you can go through based on a (somewhat) comprehensive list.

 

Interesting - good luck with that!

Yeah, I think a blog might be better, but...damn, that's a big undertaking, no matter how you slice it.

 

That's an interesting comparison. I've always preferred the latter sites myself. Honest RL businesses that don't need to depend on Internet tricks to survive, because they actually offer a tangible service or product that they create themselves.

Their websites are nothing more than one of many tools that they use to compliment the real business, not a cyber business that depends on cyber traffic, .