DMOZ - top of the search engine food chain (dmoz.org)

Member Name: bloob007

Product:	dmoz.org
Date:	13/02/01 (37 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Serves results to many search engines

Disadvantages: Submissions are dependent on the availability of the editors.

DMOZ is a directory much the same as Yahoo.com. Website owners goto http://www.dmoz.org and select a category for their site then use the form to submit to that category.

What then happens is the editor of the category picks up your form and then reviews the site. What set's it apart from Yahoo is that the editors are people like you and me. To clarify that statement. The editors are not paid for doing the work they do. Whereas at Yahoo the editors do get paid.

Anyone can become an editor of a category just so long as they can demonstrate a genuine interest in the subject area. Also prospective editors will need to fill in a form suggesting up to 3 sites to add to the category.

DMOZ is used by many search engines to serve results. Most notably it serves results for Google which in turn serves pages to Yahoo.com. Because DMOZ is available in multiple languages site submissions reflect this. Therefore you'll find many smaller regional engines pulling results from DMOZ too. This means it's a great traffic driver and you might find some very strange HTTP refer headers in your site statistics!!


On the downside it must also be said that the nature of having unpaid editors can mean that you'll submit to a category and find that it won't be added to the index for months and months, as maybe the editor is off-sick or just doesn't log in. Still you can always go to the bottom of a category and email them direct to try and speed things up.

DMOZ is not perfect but, sitting at the top of the web-results food chain, it's a very important place to get your website listed for exposure in multiple markets.

Keep up the good work.

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