March 23rd, 2010 by Nick

Of all directories on the web, DMOZ is the one that is generally considered most benefiical to search engine optimization. It’s by far the biggest manually edited directory of links that’s ever existed. It is the most valued by search engines and an inbound link from www.dmoz.org to your website brings with it more trust and authority than any other that most sites are likely to get able to get- it’s the fine wine of directory link juice, if you will. It’s an essential part of most link building strategies. DMOZ are, however, picky about which sites they include and getting listed isn’t as easy as asking nicely (although that’s never a bad start) which is one of the reasons why its so good.

Let’s start with some background. DMOZ is the directory of the Open Directory Project. The philosophy of the project owes much to the open source movement- a tendency that believes in copyright-free software where the code is available and open to anyone to use, change, and scrutinise, as long as they don’t try to take it of the open source agreement that governs the use of such software and copyright it themselves. Linux is the flagship of the open source movement.

One of the key features of open source thinking is that if everyone can see the program code, that’s a lot of eyes combing for bugs, errors, and possible security features. Linux is a very stable platform because it’s been checked by thousands of skilled programmers, who volunteer their time and expertise and get a better Linux as a result.

The Open Directory Project aims to do more or less the same thing to the whole internet, by having a large number of volunteers examine websites as if they were potentially buggy lines of software code. If a site is good, it goes in the directory. If it’s not useful, informative, or at least fun, it goes on the reject pile. It’s obvious why search engines love it and why it’s such a great part of wider SEO efforts – inclusion in DMOZ is a guarantee of website quality from a real human.

DMOZ is run by a subsidiary of the Netscape corporation, but not for direct commercial gain, and they (the Open Directory Project, not Netscape) have very few paid staff. The vast bulk of the directory editing and the deciding which sites get a listing is done by unpaid volunteers. They don’t charge for directory inclusion and the neither the Open Directory Project nor the category editors have any financial incentive to either include a website or drop it out. The project keeps a close eye on the volunteer editors, too, just in case one of them has an ulterior motive for signing up.

DMOZ is probably the closest thing the web has to an impartial searchable directory of any size. It’s not a search engine- results are arranged in static categories the user leafs through to find the subcategory they want- but it is hugely important for search engine ranking algorithms and hence search engine optimisation.

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