I watched a nasty trick take effect at the DMOZ today. Apparently, unscrupulous editors have been getting more and more black hat about using particularly clever techniques to foil their competitors who are listed at the directory. This particular technique came to me via an online acquaintance whose name I promised not to mention.
This editor's technique, as he controls some real estate categories at DMOZ, is to edit the titles and descriptions to be as bad as possible in terms of marketability, and since real estate is a sector where Google has been using ODP data to a greater degree, it's having a real effect on his clients' competitors in the sector. If you visit some of the categories here, you can play the "spot the good listing" game... It seems to be more pervasive than I expected. I was informed by my source that he/she (I don't know the individual's gender and don't want to make assumptions) picked this up from a friend practicing the same technique. I can only hope it's not spreading through the editorship like a bad virus.
The easy solution is for Google to drop the DMOZ listing data. They can pretend all they want that's it's non-commercial and that a 3rd-party description is more objective, but in the cutthroat world of SEO, DMOZ data is remarkably simple to corrupt for those who are dedicated to it. This particular trick is hard to catch if done well - editing all the titles and descriptions to be more "descriptive" and less "promotional" is generally preferred by the guidelines, and if one site in a few dozen happens to have a more "attractive" listing, who's going to notice?
If you have serious evidence proving that there's some abuse going on in a specific category or by a specific editor, please consider filing an abuse report via the ODP abuse report system at : https://report-abuse.dmoz.org/ .
Meta-editors will investigate the case and take appropriate actions if abuse is found.
There are some abusers at dmoz.org, and help from users to fight this abuse is appreciated by the editorial community.
Bob - Sadly, it would give away the editors' identities if I did. You shouldn't have to look far, though - try more popular categories and a few of the very small ones, too.
Randfish,
I didn't spent to much time looking for I could see this was being done. Can you be more specific where you have seen this?
Hey, at least those guys got listed! I've pretty much given up on the ODP. At this point I think they're the UN of cyberspace. They're a bunch of corrupt technocrats who think they don't have to answer to anyone, so they can get away with anything. They're also becoming more and more irrelevant every day. Yup, definitely the UN of cyberspace. What the ODP needs is good healthy dose of competition, or a good swift kick in the butt.
This article is excellent! Thank you Rand, please keep distributing your knowledge. Even my website is waiting for a Dmoz listing, after a timespan of 13 months. My tittle, description, all are according to dmoz rules, I have e-mailed them many times, but no use. Now I am not intrested in dmoz anymore. I think all the seo community must flag dmoz, as a corrupt directory, and stop submitting to it. I think its a time to raise our voice, by forming an alliance. Please suggest some thoughts-Rand.
Yes, adding a website to DMOZ takes time. We at sakhsen keep adding our customers to this site but few are listed and few are in the queue.
You could report a corrupt editor. Why not just become a editor to list your site? There is this blog ( https://www.becoming-a-odp-editor.blogspot.com/) Where they detail how they became a editor.
I would like to here some more about this issue.
Goog has had them on the back burner for sometime now with good reason. At the same time many new sites with great content are waiting up to a year or more to get listed at the DMOZ no doubt due to the 2 million sites sitting in unreviewed.
As the industry keeps up with the times the DMOZ is still operating in 1998, however due to the secrecy that they surround the "Open" DP with it has taken along time for the truth to come out.
With that said, other organizations are starting to emerge such as opengrid.org and others to address the concerns of the general public and the SEO industry.
Thank you from bringing up this issue. The many forms of DMOZ editor abuse are becomming so common that they are almost accepted within the editor community.
DMOZ need to learn from Wikipedia, transparency is the key to fight abuse and corruption.
That is a SERIOUS conflict of interest issue. The combination of google's importance, google reliance upon DMOZ descriptions and the value of these sites, their rankings, and how these "independant" sources can create descriptions has a potential significant impact on their economic value. That's an issue that might go to court. Lot's of money involved.
Wow - how blatant! Good write up.
Good thing I haven't been bothering to submit to DMOZ in a while!
Very interesting post Rand, thanks. Google should have quietly left the DMOZ party long ago.
DMOZ is not relevant anymore. I have been waiting for 2 years for just one listing to our site which also happens to be in the home building industry. And have still not received one response explaining why it has never been added. It's obvious the editors are corrupt.
I've heard of editors changing domains weekly on the links to make sure they don't rank well. One week it will be www.domain.com the next will be domain.com the next will have a "/" after it, sometimes they will even direct it to www.domain.com/index.html. It's a dirty place, and Im kind of glad I'm not in there so the sabotage doesn't happen to my sites.
Not standing up for DMOZ here, they do have a good many issues. However, your article should have mentioned the fact that editor rules do not allow them to include words already used in the "category" or the "title" of the listing in the description. So if a site is listed in "../real-estate/Florida/" and the title is "Broward County Realtors", none of those terms are supposed to be in the description. This could be one reason some of these listings seem to be a little light on good keyword copy. You are right though, some of those descriptions contain words they should not. Could be editor abuse or just a bad editor.
Nice one for pointing that out. Although people play down editor abuse in Dmoz it is rife.