Applying for a listing in DMOZ
This blog has been around for about 2 months now and has a good fair number of posts under its belt. So I have decided that now is a good time to submit ToMakeMoneyOnline.net to the DMOZ Directory operated by the Open Directory Project.
The DMOZ directory is the largest human-edited directory of the web and inclusion in its database requires an individual review by that human editor who decides that your website has sufficient quality and value to be included in its pages.
Inclusion in the DMOZ directory is seen as a massive boost to the overall importance of your site especially with the major search engines who consider a DMOZ listing as a quality vote for your site from a trusted independent third party source. DMOZ has a very high google page ranking of PR8 and an inbound link from a PR8 site is very, very desirable thank you very much.
I have seen warnings on a lot of sites suggesting that all forms of advertising and most affiliate linking should be removed from a website or blog before submitting it to DMOZ, as this will increase the chances of being accepted into the directory. Now my blog presently has little advertising on its pages as I wanted to provide quality content for my readers instead of excessive ‘in your face’ advertising.
I have no affiliation links but do however have one small link adsense unit at the top of my blog page. I am reluctant to remove this for an indefinite time period with no guaranteed inclusion into the directory so I will keep the single adsense link unit and trust that my content will win the day.
From my searching on the net it appears that the submission is not straight forward and inclusion, if at all, can take many weeks or months. Some of the warnings I have seen are:-
Describe your site accurately and without promotion.
Submit to the right directory category.
Submit only once.
Remove all advertising and forms of affiliation.
Wait patiently!
Submitting to the right category seems very important and is even stressed by the DMOZ directory website as follows-
‘Identify the single best category for your site. The Open Directory has an enormous array of subjects to choose from. You should submit a site to the single most relevant category. Sites submitted to inappropriate or unrelated categories may be rejected or removed.’
However finding the right category for this blog is not obvious and after finding several possible categories I decided to be clever, enter some well know blogs in my niche and see which category they are listed under. Surprisingly a lot of A-List bloggers are not listed in the DMOZ directory but I did manage to find my old friend ProBlogger.net by Darren Rowse.
Darren’s defacto blog ‘helping bloggers make money’ is listed under:-
Top: Computers: Internet: On the Web: Weblogs: Resources
This category has the accompanying description in DMOZ of:-
‘Communities, user groups, e-zines, articles and other resources for and about web logs, blogging and bloggers’.
So yes that’s definitely the right category for my blog.
So what’s good enough for Darren is good enough for me and that’s the category that I have submitted to. Interestingly the weblogs category has only 900 listings and the resources category only 78 listings which both seen a very low number for all those blogs out there. Is this an indication of the difficulty in obtaining a DMOZ listing or are bloggers not bothering to apply?
So I’ve just applied, fingers crossed. Has anyone out there any experience in submitting to DMOZ, good or bad?
SEO
