Is DMOZ still Important to your SEO?

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Wednesday, 24 August 2011 09:33

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DMOZ has been a joke and a bugbear in the SEO world pretty much ever since it came into being. Inflated in importance because of the importance Google gives it, it has been a subject I have written about on three separate occasions, once to explain how you can submit your website to it,  once to explain why it simply has to change and the last time to announce (misleadingly as it turned out) that it was finally going to become what every webmaster running an online business hoped it might become.

The fact that here we are again, talking about it, suggests that no change has taken place. For those who are new to SEO DMOZ is an important human-ran (and hugely frustrating and inefficient) directory which, if it lists your website, can provide an important link leading back to it which Google takes into account when calculating your website’s

I guess the question we need to keep in mind here is just how should DMOZ fit in with your online business promotion strategy? Well, really DMOZ should figure in your overall linking strategy. The directory is too important to ignore (even though Matt Cutts suggests you can find alternatives – the ones he used in his example are just as hard if not harder to get) but life is too short to get grey hairs over DMOZ (and this is actually a strong possibility). Persistence with it does, apparently, pay off so if at first you do not succeed you really do need to try again.

My advice is that until you are actually listed you should get into the habit of checking every eight weeks (anything sooner is too soon, anything longer becomes an exercise in hope and despair) by visiting DMOZ and checking to see if your website has been listed. If it hasn’t submit it again and, to facilitate the process, it might be a good idea to keep a back-up record of everything you put in the first time including the category you submitted it in, so now all you have to do is copy and paste.

I have seen websites jump PageRank by two-three points because of a single DMOZ link and I have seen websites increase their Google ranking on the organic search page results by as much as five places which can make a huge difference in the traffic they get and the money they make.

Bottom line is that DMOZ is still, unfortunately, important, no matter how much I wish this was not the case, so do not let it slip off your radar.

 

 

 

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