There has been growing frustration amongst webmasters for several years about the state and value of the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). I would like to relate my own experience and feelings about this long-running directory.

For those not familiar with the ODP, it launched in 1998 and very quickly became one of the most important places to have your website listed as other search engines, including Google, were cloning their data and putting great importance on the ODP listing as an indicator of the site’s value. This was based primarily on the fact that the ODP was entirely Human Edited, versus being crawled by a web-bot.

The ODP continues to be property of Netscape (remember them?), which in turn is owned by AOL/Time Warner.

Over the last couple of years conditions, from a webmasters point-of-view, have deteriorated to the point where I personally have become indifferent about the ODP and no longer consider it of any real value to SEO. My opinion is based on these simple facts:

- I have not successfully achieved a new listing in DMOZ for at least 2 years
- Their database is full of dead and out-dated links* and there is no way to report a link to an editor
- None of the volunteer editors I have tried to contact have responded to any enquiries
- For over two years I have tried (unsuccessfully) to have an inaccurate site description updated
- The domains that I do have listed in the ODP receive little to no traffic from them anymore. Of the last 23,000 unique hits, 5 came from Dmoz.
- The Google (ODP Clone) Directory continues to exist, but they have removed the link from their front page and buried it
- My employers website currently has a Google Page Rank of 6, despite not being listed in the ODP

The big question becomes “should you still submit your site to the ODP?”

My answer is “Why Not?”. Until it completely disappears, it takes only a few minutes to submit a listing, and you might actually be successful somewhere in the future. If you succeed in getting listed it might actually have some minor impact on your over-all marketing and search traffic, but don’t expect a miracle.

I certainly wouldn’t lose sleep trying to get into DMOZ and there are other options that can delivery the same incoming link result, with far more certainty.

The Yahoo directory is seen by most search engines, including Google, as an indicator of the value of your site. This is simply based on the your willingness to pay the $299 they charge annually to be “considered”.

Another directory worth submitting to is the venerable old “Best Of The Web”, which has been operating since 1994, making it the oldest directory on the web. The cost is either $99/year, or a one-time $249 fee; again this is to be “considered”, with no guarantee of being listed and no refunds.

Will you receive much traffic from either Yahoo or BOTW? Probably not, but the value and ROI of the incoming link will need to be measured longer-term as you monitor your Google Page Rank, and your over-all performance in the search results. For any serious commercial website $400 to submit for 1 year is peanuts given the potential positive impact. If you get listed and don’t feel there was a return for your dollars, simply don’t renew the following year.

The world has changed and my belief is that static web directories have been largely left behind. Surfers want Current and Now, not “reviewed 5 years ago and possibly still there”. Outside of Google, active, dynamic social sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon have become just as important as directories for fresh traffic.

Surfers also thirst for information beyond the 1-2 vague description lines that most directories provide. Wikipedia has exploded as a result of this changing demand. Type in almost any generic term in Google (try soccer) and the first result will most likely be from Wikipedia.

To summarize, Time-Warner (AOL) derives absolutely no visible revenue from the Open Directory Project. I believe the time has come (and maybe gone) to sell the ODP to someone interested in moving it forward and making it relevant again. The entire volunteer editor model needs to go. It has simply created a world of little kingdoms ruled by a small group of dictators.

If that’s not going to happen then I would like to see Google, who gives the ODP it’s only real legitimacy, and which still places some value on a Dmoz listing, end their relationship and make it clear to everyone that ODP is no longer a valuable resource.

While building their present database Google used and needed the Open Directory as a back-up source of search results. Now I think the ODP desperately needs Google for it’s very survival.

*My statement about the number of out-dated and dead links comes from my first-hand experience testing an excerpt of their database. I exported 6000 links into software on my own server and then ran an internal crawler, which identified 1235 of those links as dead or redirecting.