DMOZ is Open For Business!

If you're like me, you many have been wondering what has happened to DMOZ these last few months? For those of you who don't know about DMOZ, you should familiarize yourself with the site as it drives search results for tons of influential sites.


The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as dmoz (from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), is a multilingual open directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. Launched in 1998, DMOZ is used by millions of websites - including some very popular ones, to provide link information.

When doing link analysis, I've noticed that a number of competitive sites appear on affiliate or related sites simply because those site have integrated DMOZ listings into their pages.

The end result is that your competitors may recieve higher seach engine results placement becase their website (via DMOZ) are appearing on more websites than you are. The simple remedy is to list your site in DMOZ. If you want to make the most of your listing, be sure to do the following...

When submitting your site, make sure that the link title contains your keywords. The result will be many links back to your site with the specific keywords you are optimizing for. This 'off-page' optimization is essential.

One last warming... be patient. Before the temporary outage, it took DMOZ about 3 months to list your website. The same might be true today.