Founded in 1998 by Rich Skrenty and Bob Truel, the DMOZ directory remembers the times before Google and search engines became the most important tool for searching for data.
The directory was moderated by a community of over 90,000 volunteers who approved only sites that met the required criteria. Sometimes you had to wait several months for an application to be accepted, and sometimes you had to re-apply several times because it didn't always work the first time.
Website directories and SEO
Directories like DMOZ are websites with business cards of websites, divided into different categories by topic. Directories once played a very important role on the Internet. They were the vietnam b2b leads equivalent of the popular American yellow pages. Thanks to them, you could find a partner for cooperation in any industry. One of the first and most famous was the Yahoo Directory, but from the point of view of SEO and Google, it was DMOZ that had the greatest significance.
In the times when positioning was mainly based on incoming links, directories played a big role, which is why they sprouted like mushrooms after rain. On the Internet, you could buy ready-made scripts for running directories for not much money, which is why people dealing with SEO optimization and positioning sometimes operated even several dozen directories on different servers, changing only their colors.
Heuristics in DMOZ
Adding a website to directories is a relatively tedious job - you have to create an account, fill out a form adding a title, description, tags, offer, photos. The SEO industry took advantage of this by offering another service, which was cataloging, i.e. adding a website to many directories. This was done automatically or semi-automatically by using prepared scripts. It was relatively convenient for both parties and financially beneficial.
Cataloging originally belonged to White Hat SEO and was tolerated by Google. Unfortunately, over time, directories became the main tool in generating links and began to resemble pages with valuable information. Google, seeing that directories had lost the purpose for which they were originally created, i.e. helping users find valuable information, and had become a place to generate links for positioned pages, introduced an algorithm called Penguin, which caused pages abusing cataloging, especially so-called link farms, to be punished and thrown out of search results. Here we write more about Penguin .
The introduction of Penguin to the algorithm did not completely make directories lose their importance. Valuable, moderated directories were still used to acquire links in the process of positioning websites, but links from these directories began to lose their importance.
Summary
The deactivation of DMOZ can be considered important information for the SEO industry. It is a signal that directories are no longer playing a big role and that it is not worth paying more attention to them. Of course, it cannot be said that the value of links from popular commercial directories that users still use are losing their importance completely, or, for example, links from blogs or services placed in the "recommended pages" section, which can also be considered a kind of directory.
The importance of traditional SEO page directories will certainly be marginalized, and in time this part of the Internet will completely disappear. It is difficult to predict how long the SEO industry will use the support of popular directories, but we can be sure that in the coming years, cataloging will completely disappear from the offer of SEO companies.
