4-5 years ago listing on DMOZ was crucial due to the fact that it was used by many sites, added to popularity and brought traffic to the site. With the supremacy of search engines that occurred over the past 5 years, DMOZ and all other directories became much less relevant. We used to spend great efforts to list sites on DMOZ. My feeling is that it is no longer worth the effort. The benefits of DMOZ listings are few if any. It no longer brings any worthwhile traffic. It has no contribution to search engine rankings. It has been dropped by nearly everyone from algorithmic searches. This is our experience/impression. Do you agree? Have you have better results ***attributable*** to DMOZ or any other directory listings recently?
Good point acclaim! Now be a good little Network Affiliate Program Manager and make sure you pass that bit of wisdom on to your affiliate drones please. It'll save us the trouble of banning them and leave us more time to review sites with good unique content. ps. Sorry for flaming you. pss. Er, I mean, no I'm not.
This, in a nutshell is the number one problem DMOZ editors face; the reason the submission pools are overflowing, the reason that good honest webmasters are frustrated by the long wait for review, etc... Why in the world would a "Network Affiliate Program Manager" spend great effort to get sites listed when the DMOZ guidelines specifically say not to suggest them because we do not list them. Any editor will confirm this is true. This is the type of person that webmasters should blame for the looong wait to get into DMOZ; this is the kind of crap that backs up the system and makes it harder for everyone to get good unique content to the surfers who are looking for it. Good advice! Affiliate crapmasters are persistant about "spending great efforts" to get sites listed. They submit over and over and over everywhere to the point that a lot of editors don't even bother looking at the sites that have been over submitted...it's a good sign that they may be garbage. Those who submit and forget are the first ones I look at when I work in a category. Sorry for the rant. Well, I should be sorry for the rant, but heck, who am I kidding. As a Shopping editor, guys like acclaim are my sworn enemy. <chew> <spit>
Great answer annie, to bad he's not man enough to reply... and don't be sorry for the rant...it's not ranting if it's true!
I have a site that will be four years old this January. I submitted DMOZ soon after launch date, but still nothing. Two other sites I put in are also producing zippo. I think if you got to DMOZ before Y2K you had a better chance of getting in. Since then, everything appears to be backed up.
When I was granted Regional Editor of my country there were about 7,000 unreviewed. The first thing I did is I look at them and spent the whole 2 weeks just deleting affiliate marketing sites. Most of them in Travel, Real Estate, Shopping and Business. By the time I got through with those, I looked at the unreviewed queue and seen that I have only 3000 sites left. Wow !!! These guys must be having a good time submitting to the ODP back then.
Yes popotalk, that's the main reason for the backlog IMO. That's 2 weeks that you could have spent reviewing other sites if only the spammers hadn't buried the decent submissions with their trash. And seriously, Regional categories get less of that crap than other categories. Shopping is a real nightmare, I can spend several hours deleting crap and consider myself lucky if I can list 5% of the submissions. Affiliate marketing isn't inherently evil, but their habit of spamming is.
If you provide the URLs of the sites you are referring to then the reason why they are not yet listed might be easily explained, e.g. they may be totally unlistable, they may be on a particularly spam prone topic, etc. OTOH, I listed maybe 4000 sites no-one ever submitted to DMOZ so there are 4000 webmasters who got a pleasant surprise without asking. That's life.
Evil would be too harsh a term. Completely without value, useless, worthless I would say. To the surfer that is. To the webmaster, quite useful. Must go check my expedia winnings... actually that is a use - family and friends use my affiliate links for Expedia and Amazon and we share the occasional bonus. Better than the companies or other affiliates getting the commission. Sort of a cooperative.
I have my site listed in DMOZ, Y! Dir and Google directory listings. Having the links on there help my site to a certain extent. If you focus your efforts on marketing your site on other established websites, it will pay off more. Open Directories only take you so far, sometimes it's not far enough.
You missed the news.... DMOZ R.I.P. Absolutely useless..... millions and millions of spam page submission and very few editors....
That's a good use of affiliate marketing. It's only when they cross the line and start spamming that it turns evil.
I am an editor and I can definitely say that it is not true. DMOZ is full of affiliate links mostly owned by editors. Spam problem can easily be solved if DMOZ decides to adopt reasonable and working procedures but a non working DMOZ is beneficial for "senior" editors.
Gworld, as an editor, you're supposed to delete listings of that nature if you come across them. If you have reason to believe they are owned by an editor you're supposed to report the editor for abuse. That's what I've always done.
Oh, are you on Adult again? I think acclaim was talking about more mainstream affiliate sites. I'm secretly hoping the down time with dmoz is caused by the Adult category getting irreversibly broken. We can always dream.
To answer: I am a manager of an affiliate program. Not an affiliate. If we submit anything, it would be the original company website. The point of my post was that DMOZ has become a relic of the past, whether due to the fact that it never resolved the issue of spam or because search became so dominant and good. Search has spam but no one in their right mind would claim that you can get better info from DMOZ than google. As a result from a marketing perspective you're going to get your next customer from google, not dmoz.