Is Dmoz Really Back? Death Of The Odp - Dmoz Down

On December 18 2006, a new announcement on the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) website states that editing functions have been restored, prompting a bunch of top SEO bloggers to comment on the return of DMOZ. Lets examine what’s really back and if dmoz will survive or if this new development just prolongs their slow demise.
Currently DMOZ editors can log into their accounts (the ones who didn’t quit from the extended downtime and move on to more valuable projects) and add new sites. All of their editor data including notes, comments, and the queue of submitted sites to be reviewed has been lost.

The submit URL feature on the directory is still down. So editors have to search Google and manually add sites they find valuable, one by one. The editors who were banned, who stopped contributing to or who quit dmoz all together are still listed as active in their former categories and still have profile pages. The number on the front page of dmoz (74,719 editors) most certainly takes these into account and is grossly inaccurate.

Simply enabling some editors to add sites does not mean they’re back DMOZ is still down: you can’t add sites, the editor data has been lost and nothing new or improved is in the works. By letting the most die hard editors resume adding site manually they’ve delayed their death, but DMOZ is still down. They’ve failed to adapt to a changing marketing place, failed to implement any web 2.0 features, and generally survived based on their old reputation, which is now irrefutably tattered from extended downtime on top of years of slow updates and lackluster performance.

Dmoz is everything web 1.0 stood for and that time has passed. Time Magazine’s person of the year is You and by that they mean the contributors to all the social media sites like Youtube, Myspace, digg, Wikipedia, among many others. Google and other search engines are already downplaying the importance of directory links, so even the SEO benefit is not what is use to be.

I believe Dmoz needs to come completely back or disappear. They are no longer play an important part in the internet landscape.

[tagsdmoz,open directory project,aol search,human edited directories,search engine optimization,SEO[/tags

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