Hello there, jinx, peon, posts=2... nice to see you here at DigitalPoint. Just curious, though... what exactly is your stake in this dog fight?
It's no idea to try, the idea wont work. DMOZ is already established to the point that it's impossible to beat them without some big money. If it was easy, MSN or Yahoo could do it. You will see that bigoole.com wont make it. Secondly, the web is already bloated to death with general directories.
Look, I have no personal feelings one way or another when it comes to DMOZ. I'm not one of these people that obsesses over DMOZ and their editors. I just really don't care! All I can tell you, is that a link from DMOZ is usually very helpful. More helpful than a link from most other directories. And that's about all I'm going to say on this.
"More helpful than a link from most other directories" I can agree with. But then most other directories are low PR and low quality. I don't think that's the best comparison, though. A link from DMOZ is just a link and provides no more benefit from any other equivalent PR link with a degree of topic-relevance. DMOZ gives you no special leverage with Google or anyone else. And it certainly gives you no significant traffic... the only traffic I generally get from DMOZ is when I've pissed off a few more editors or admins.
I must agree with you on this one. Here is one example: In Google seprs my website description is the one from DMOZ, not the one I have in my description tag. This definitely proves that Google still gives DMOZ some importance.
How does it prove anything of the sort? Especially since Google now suggests that you use the NOODP meta tag if you dislike the DMOZ description? And since there is no evidence that the description/snippet used has anything whatsoever to do with Google search ranking?
This is true, as far as it goes, but what about all the other links it provides? As I've said in other DMOZ threads so many other directories just take DMOZ content and repurpose it. Getting one DMOZ link is probably roughly equivalent to getting x number others (x being a number between 10-50 depending on other directories) with the effort of only obtaining one link. Yeah they're not super high quality Jim Boykin highly researched links, but they're still free. Again though it depends on your market, competitors, and sector. We find it pretty handy in the etailer segment, but if you have an informational blog or something it might not be as useful. We have a bunch of DMOZ links and to tell the truth we don't get a lot of organic traffic from DMOZ itself, but we do collectively get quite a bit from related directories using the open source DMOZ content. I know a lot of you guys are personally offended by DMOZ but I don't think you can take it so far as to say it's useless, or even only worth just one link from an equivalent PR/topic source. And even if it is the latter, most of our linked directory pages are PR4 or greater which is likely still useful for Google backlink/PR calculation purposes (though how useful we unfortunately can't tell). I'm not drinking the DMOZ kool aid, I have a lot of the same problems everyone else seems to have here with its structure, lack of transparency, and potential for abuse. But to rule it out entirely seems to be cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Most of those DMOZ clones have zero value. And as Google continues to improve its duplicate content filters, any remaining ones will soon drop off the radar too.
I haven't forgotten the Google Directory - but Google pretty much has. How often is it updated? How easy is it to even find, unless you know the URL? That has become Google's neglected bastard child, supplanted by the new Google "wiki-directory".
How does it prove anything of the sort? Google using DMOZ description in it's SERPS is not proving anything? OK, there is no evidence that it improves ranking (simply because it would be very hard to prove something like that) but it definitely suggests that google is giving some importance to DMOZ, otherwise it would not use it's description.
I'm sorry but you're wrong about that. Google uses snippets that vary with the search term, but which usually includes the description meta tag. But the available evidence is that the description meta tag is NOT one of the factors that is considered in ranking the page. It's just a snippet to describe the page, no more no less. Whether Google uses DMOZ or your own description tag, it means the same - just a snippet - not part of the ranking algorithm.
How can it not be part of the ranking algorithm!? They're pulling it as the description for your site. I'm pretty sure that factors in somewhere.
Test it yourself. This was a small test reported by someone at WebProWorld some time ago: Pick a page with decent ranking in Google. Now add a term that doesn't appear anywhere else in the title, the meta tags, the URL, in the on-page content, or in an anchor text for internal or external links to the page. See if that page ranks for that term anywhere. The previous test I saw found the answer to be "no".
Test it with a word or phrase with no competition. That is the only way to tell. And that still couldn't prove that it isn't a factor. You don't know what kind of weight that factor carries.