The 6422 Surefire Steps of Getting a DMOZ Listing
I finally got a DMOZ listing for Jamdo. I am so happy that I could almost cry.
But seriously, as you can guess from my rather cynical title, I am at a complete loss as to explain how to get into that directory.
Now I enjoy writing Jamdo and I hope I impart some useful information, but to put it bluntly, I own several other sites that are far superior to Jamdo in terms of the quality and quantity of content that they deliver. Moreover, they are much older and have some pretty serious link love from high quality sites including main stream media, .edu sites and even a couple of . gov links.
Yet, despite the quality of those sites and their relatively high quality links (meaning real people find them useful), multiple attempts over multiple years have failed at gaining them a directory listing with the almighty DMOZ.
Is it worth the hassle?
In a word, no.
The importance of DMOZ is declining. It imparts limited traffic and so the only reason you really want a listing is for the link juice. Traditionally, the many sites that use DMOZ listings as content, have really helped the link popularity of sites in the directory, as a single DMOZ link suddenly becomes several links on others sites as well. But Matt Cutts has stated that the DMOZ clones (ie other directories that scrape DMOZ results) impart virtually no link love anymore and so even that reason to be in DMOZ is declining.
To be honest, I think the links you get from making the front page of a social bookmarking site would probably be more useful in terms of SEO. People tend to blog the items that make the front page of Digg and the others meaning that those items are getting varied links from relevant pages (rather than the duplicate content links from the duplicate content pages that DMOZ clones deliver).
In short, sure you can submit your sites for DMOZ inclusion, but don’t sweat it if they don’t get in.
As far as direct traffic and quality links for the purposes of SEO are concerned, there are far more efficient ways to spend your time.
