Dropped from dmoz after a year and a half.

I haven't seen that question asked (And in all honesty, they aren't gonna be giving away any secrets when it comes down to their organic results).

 

On behalf of the thread, my apologies. If you think you might be happier or more comfortable in another thread, I'd be happy to recommend a few...

 

Thanks for (trying) to bring this thread back onto course. I've taken your advice, will see how it goes

 

It sounds to me like the perfect solution.

DMOZ claims that they find most of the new sites by themselves and that sites submitted by webmasters are mostly spam. People on forums like this claim that the only people who apply to be an editor are webmasters looking to slam their competitors. Get the webmasters totally uninterested in DMOZ is probably the best thing DMOZ can do. After all, webmasters using DMOZ to artifically inflate their PR is NOT the goal of DMOZ. This would let DMOZ focus on being ... what is it they claim .. the worlds largest human edited directory ... without seo nuts trying to make it a PR farm.

 

Why aren't they responding to this? Like I said, I'm sure they have their reasons - getting into a discussion with them surely will answer some of these questions that you always have, which seem to boil down to "Why does Google allow so much importance to be placed on ODP listings?"

Where I am going with this is that I see a fundamental clash of cultures between this world of Web Professionals and ODP editors - there are fundamental differences in goals which I don't believe any amount of complaining is going to change. The only answer you will get is the standard "you are not our customer/we're not building the directory to service your needs" answers which you are all sick of.

If you truly believe that the ODP useless source of data for the Google rankings, then in my opinion, the only way you are going to change things for the better for you is to manage to convince Google directly to change, rather than trying to force a change in a directory whose stated goals do not correspond with yours.

The ODP isn't set up to do what you folks need it to do. Not only that, the vision and mandate of the project don't in any way match your needs, as web professionals. You will always be able to complain about how ODP editors don't do what you feel they should. But it won't change anything. Putting energy repeatedly into something that just isn't going to change is, to me, futile.

I maintain that Google are using the ODP for a reason - not due to negligence. And I think we need to find out why. Knowing the answer to that question might resolve a lot of the seemingly endless debate and complaints that go on in fora like this.

Sorry to contribute to the hijacking of this thread, but I wanted to try to really understand what is going on, rather than giving pat answers....

 

Precisely. This is the point I have tried to make before (pay attention here, sitetutor).

Why hasn't Google taken action yet? (1) we don't know that they haven't; (2) we don't know that they aren't in the process of doing it now; (3) we don't know what other issues they are looking at that they see as higher priority at the moment; (4) maybe they just need more complaints and negative publicity to bring it to their attention -- Google HAS shown itself to be responsive to public opinion in the past.

Will Google ever take action? I believe it's inevitable.

 

I agree!

As to the dmoz feeds : unless it breaks a standard, you could change the feed, of course that will most likely break all the feeds until the webmasters fix it (many may strip out the nofollow tag, but again, many will not). How many are giving credit to dmoz as is part of the terms of using the feed I wonder.

At any rate, nofollow may not be the total solution, but it will help. Are there any other free PR9 directories out there? That is part of what makes DMOZ a big target. Take away the PR, take away some of the impetus to spam it. Blogs have done this exactly for that reason, because comment spam was out of control, and it was hurting google. So Google provided a way for sites to not leak their PR.

So, in essence, it's not you fixing a problem in google. It's you using a tool google has invented(?) and provided you to make the net work better for human users. You think webmasters want nofollow on DMOZ? They most definitely would not, because it would only benefit DMOZ and the real users who come there for information.

But I think a lot of editors have vested interest in the PR and backlinks dmoz provides (for numerous reasons, power, weight, traffic for themselves, an illusion to make DMOZ seem more useful than it is : "Look how many people submit it must be useful!"), they seem much more concerned with that, than reviewing sites and stamping out corruption.

 

dmoz feeds - I assume you mean the RDF files - since they are just a list of URL's, any changes to the DMOZ web site to add nofollow would have no effect on them.

 

Why is that, macdesign?

If the links downloaded in the dump are of the form

<a href="http://www.domain.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.domain.com</a>

Code (markup):

then, unless the person using the DMOZ dump deliberately edited those links, why would the DMOZ changes not propagate to anyone using the dumps?

 

But they are not, there is no HTML in the dump, putting code like that in would break the RDF for every user. Most people take the RDF dump and convert into something like mySQL, then use the mySQL to create HTML.

And note that not all users of the RDF are creating HTML so it shoudl not be in there anyway, it end's up mixing content with display - the whole idea of XML is to prevent that.

 

Oh, okay.

1. nice idea, nddb -- kudos!

2. unfortunately, I'm told it won't work

3. back to Plan B: "harassing Google"

 

At one point in time, probably the idea with directory, especially "human edited" sounded good and since DMOZ was already an orphan as an organization then Google probably thought why not take something that is free and use it to improve the Google business.

They are still a business and from business point of view, they must think what is cost/benefit ratio for making their own directory. How many users are ready to pay a high fee to get listed in Google directory and how does such directory will look since it does not include all resources but only few who has paid.

How about the man power that is needed? At present time the only pay that editors have is through the corruption and different scams but since Google can not run it that way, how many people do they need to hire and what will be the cost?

I think from business point of view the directory doesn't make sense and they probably reason that in time the improvement is search engine and their algorithm will kill the directory, so in mean time they just use DMOZ until they get around to kicking it.

 

Not a nice thing to say about some forum owners.

 

>> A couple of years ago, Google reduced the prominence of the Google Directory on their websites, which coincided with a sharp reduction in the frequency with which they update their DMOZ feeds. <<

... which coincided with a bug in the RDF generation that meant that for 6 months the ODP could not produce an error-free RDF, and this was at least partly caused by server overload, which prompted the project to expand the number of servers with a separate RDF server, separate editor server, and additional public servers, during which time there was still no new RDF, but after the upgrades the RDF fared a little better with a few being produced, but these then had many errors caused by the fact that every different language branch was using a different character encoding for site listings, and so a project was started to convert the whole lot to UTF-8 which required every category name, every link, and millions of sites to be converted. This project took months, still without a usable RDF appearing. Not all of it could be automated. After bulk conversion of the database, an extra few hundred thousand edits were done using specialised "run once" editor tools, and several tens of thousands of entries were auto-checked for errors and hand-edited to fix them. During this time the ODP only produced a very few RDF files, and mostly still with errors, so Google had no new feed to work on during that time.

You saw that Google did not update very often and assumed that was some Google policy.

In fact, it was caused by hardware upgrades and data migration at the ODP end.


>> The point is a webmaster isn't going to waste time submitting 100s of links to dmoz if they have the nofollow tag. People with feeds could strip out the nofollow tag, but many won't and dmoz won't be passing any PR. <<

The RDF file is a database file. It contains the category information, site URL, title and description. It does not contain any HTML code. There is no place in the RDF to put a nofollow attribute. That attribute goes on the final HTML page, that page generated by the clone site server, and hence nothing at all to do with the data that the ODP provides. If the ODP puts "nofollow" on all of its outbound links.there is no way for that attribute to also magically appear on any of the other clone sites. No way whatsoever.


>> break all the feeds until the webmasters fix it (many may strip out the nofollow tag, but again, many will not). <<

The RDF file could never contain a nofollow attribute. The attribute goes in the HTML page. It has nothing to do with the feed data in the RDF file.


>> If the links downloaded in the dump are of the form... <<

Aaargh! Why do you keep repeating this? The RDF dump does not contain "links". It is a database file with URLs, titles and descriptions only. Please go read up on the RDF file format.

 

As was said before, even if it was possible to put the rel attribute in the rdf they could strip it out, or probably ignore it. Plus to force it in would probably be non-standard...

But you're missing the point, the feeds are only part of the problem. Like I said above, how many free PR9 directories are there? DMOZ's PR also is a big factor, it's easy enough to get some backlinks from silly sites (just like the ones duping dmoz content). But DMOZ lends weight in other ways.

But Alucard is right, it's pointless talking to DMOZ people about it. Google will have to make the change. So, hopefully they will.

 

Utter crap. It was caused by disinterest and is continuing, as far as I know. Are you trying to claim that DMOZ has been having "hardware upgrades" and "data migration" problems for the past 2 years?

Please. This is an example of DMOZ bullshit at the other end of the dimension from what we see in Alucards posts. Don't insult our intelligence, spike. If this is all you have to offer, get the hell back to RZ where someone, possibly, might be moronic enough to be interested

I believe macdesign already posted this and it has already been replied to...

Yeah. we get it... try to take a moment to read the thread.

If DMOZ really cares about or want to improve its public image, here's a suggestion: More Alucards and jimnobles and a LOT fewer spikes and Hutchesons.

 

Firstly, Alucard, hats off to you for coming to this forum and been open, honest, and respectful to human's opinions.

From where I sit as a webmaster, not an SEO expert or web designer, Im not perfect, I went to RZ to ask questions, and yes I should of read the documentation, but I was wet behind the ears and in return for my innocent questions I received a tirade of abuse and nastyness from a few other ego'd editors.

I have to say when I got around to submitting my website people like Alucard, and Jim were VERY helpful, okay I didn't get the response I wanted, but you both came across as been helpful.. and this is simply what webmasters want when visiting RZ.

Yes, we can understand that their are idiots out there that spam DMOZ, or are agreesive towards editors, but because they are people out there like that don't tarnish us all with the same brush.

From someone who does a lot of research on my competition, and is interested in travelling I DO used DMOZ and I have to say as a directory it is the best because it has so many websites listed there, and you can get to the information easily, so I'd personally not like to see DMOZ vanish, just maybe 90% of the editors.

Darren

 

http://www.corruptdmozeditor.com/2004/12/sabotaging-competitors-dmoz-listing.html
http://www.corruptdmozeditor.com/2004/12/how-to-bribe-dmoz-editor.html

LOL, has anyone seen this site? (probably old news) It's funny though.

 

On the contrary; the truth is, most editors don't believe you are all tarnished with the same brush at all. Rather, most of us simply remain silent because of persons in forums like this who tarnish all editors with the same brush.

I respectfully posted to one thread here and got flamed. I saw the same thing happen to an odp adminstrator. Neither of us were condescending or rude. In fact, I challenge you to find even one rude post from me either here or at R-Z.

Should editors be "respectful to human opinions" of well meaning submitters, webmasters, and seo professionals? Absolutely! On the other hand, submitters, webmasters, and seo professionals should be "respectful to human opinions" of well meaning editors as well.

Oh yeah, I agree that Alucard really is awesome, isn't he?

 

>> utter crap <<

No, it is you that is uttering the crap.

All the data is publicly available to confirm what I wrote: http://rdf.dmoz.org/rdf/archive/

There are gaps in the RDF generation, many weeks without new files, but even where there is a file, very many of those generated RDFs have errors, so although there is a file, it isn't very usable.