If you’re asking “The death of what?”, then my point is already proved

The Legend Of DMOZ

Once upon a time in search engine optimization land, there was a directory called DMOZ. There are (of course) directories in existence today, but DMOZ was believed to be something special.

It was said that if you could get your website into DMOZ, the gods of Google would bless your domain and permit it free passage through the rivers of its search engine. The problem is that DMOZ was heavily protected by its guardians known as “Editors”.

Editors were a very selective group of creatures and sometimes it would take years upon ages for them to approve your website into their directory. Many a brave web developer attempted to triumph over the Editors but it was truly a hard fought battle. Nary a single developer escaped rejection without first becoming lost to the ages.

And now it would seem that the once hallowed ground of Google may be tainted by the stench of corruption that freely flows from the halls of DMOZ.

Will a hero rise and stand against DMOZ? Only time will tell.

A little story from Bush Mackel there, where I first learned of the DMOZ Blackmail Scandal, revealed on Pure Blogging via Shoemoney.

In short, DMOZ is an open source human-edited directory of the internet, where anyone can submit their site for inclusion, for free. Thousands of unpaid editors, who should have some knowledge of the field they’re editing, decide whether or not the site is suitable for inclusion. Apparently Google and many other Search Engines based and/or continue to base a large part of their index upon the directory, so if you’re listed you’re in good shape for a good rating in SERPs.

Corruption Or Not? 

The blackmail story goes that Jeremy Schoemaker AKA Shoemoney was recently approached by a DMOZ editor and asked to pay $5000 or find his site deleted from the DMOZ directory. He didn’t pay, and his listing disappeared.

This story was covered by Pure Blogging and within the comments, one Rob Jones who purports to be a DMOZ editor, states that the facts are somewhat different: essentially Shoemoney had long been removed from the index for a past infraction, but was mistakenly re-added after the DMOZ major server failures of last year. As soon as it was noticed that his site was back in, it was yanked again and this had nothing to do with the attempted extortion outlined above, for which no evidence has apparently been presented.

All this shows really is the beauty of the internet for presenting two halves of the same story in totally different lights, and nobody knows where the truth lies. But does it really matter? Who cares about DMOZ anyway?

Are You In?

Is your site in DMOZ? Do you know anyone’s who is?

I have submitted 4 sites to DMOZ so far for inclusion, one nearly 12 months ago, the others just over 6, and as yet none are in the directory. It’s patently obvious that the human review system doesn’t work, whether through inaction, overwork or anything more sinister. Certainly one of the sites I submitted was to a directory branch of about a dozen other sites, none of which were significantly better from mine, yet a year on, there is no approval, no rejection, nothing. This isn’t sour grapes, but if some of those other sites are in, so should mine be.

At the time of the server failure last year, I was a regular lurker in their forums and was astonished at the attitude of most of the moderators towards people asking reasonable questions. The responses were often brusque, rude or  just resulted in an outright banning for the questioner. I came away with the impression of an arrogant organisation who thought they were above the people without whom they’d be nothing: the people building the websites.

The Bigger They Are…

Ultimately though I think they, like some other players in the computer/web arena have reached the point of making themselves irrelevant, through bad attitude, complacency and smugness. Somebody just needs to tell Google to base their index on something relevant to the web in 2007, but given some of the noises coming out of Mountain View in the last few months, I don’t think they’d listen.

So are DMOZ corrupt? I don’t see how you can say that from what I’ve read so far – maybe one of their editors is, but that accusation may end up going to court unless some more evidence is forthcoming. More to the point though, is DMOZ relevant anymore? I don’t think so.

Are you in? Had you even heard of DMOZ?