I have a couple websites included in DMOZ. I also like to keep track of new sites that link to mine, so instead of manually doing a "link:[website name]" search repeatedly, I have configured such a search at googlealert.com. When new links are found, the results are e-mailed to me. My question: I continually get results listing sites that happen to be fed by DMOZ. I am wondering, is this constant trickling in of results a result of these sites not being found immediately, or are there really that many sites adding new DMOZ feeds all the time? -- Duncan
There are a lot of new directories that use dmoz to initially "seed" them. Google also excludes and includes exisiting directories from time to time. I believe google has recently started to ignore most of these dmoz clones for purposes of SERPS as they are really just a duplicate of DMOZ and their own directory which is a dmoz feed. This could be the reason why is appears a DMOZ listing does not carry as much weight as it used to. I have 10 dmoz sites and I don't notice much difference between the non-listed ones - although I do believe it still gives a slight boost to SERPS.
There are quite a few sites utilizing DMOZ data other than Google. The sites that comply with the ODP licenses requirements are listed in Sites Using ODP Data. There is also another list of sites, which are not in compliance with the ODP licenses, available to editors only.
>I have configured such a search at googlealert.com How have you configured the alert? If its configured to search for changes in the top 100 sites that rank for your site's name --- then you only get an alert from them when a new site moves into the top 100 -- in this case its when the pages from the DMOZ clone ranks in the top 100 for your site's name (I do the same and get DMOZ clones moving into the top 100 for several site names I follow all the time) NB - the alert you are talking about is one from googlealert.com, which is different to the alerts you can set up at Google for different things (they both are 2 very different things)
I have been playing with serving parts of DMOZ on some of my sites. But I have inserted "noindex nofollow" instructions in the robots text. My thinking was that I did not want my server serving DMOZ all over again to search engines; and that simply repeating parts of DMOZ locally may hurt more than help my site rankings. Is this sound thinking?
"no index, nofollow" isn't a robots.txt instruction - it's a page <head> meta tag. How did you try to do it?
>> How have you configured the alert? Hi, Birdie. Yes, I meant to say I configured an alert at googlealert.com, not Google itself. I am using the free service, not the paid service that would provide the deeper results. Good point about them only being reported when they move into the top 100. I had forgotten that googlealert does that. -- Duncan