GroupThink is where I turn the blog post over to you.

DMOZ, AKA the Open Directory Project, has long been thought to be dead by most of the SEO community. “Submit and forget about it” is the common advice we’ve been giving out for a couple years now; obsessing over getting that trusted directory link just isn’t worth it. Worse, just last week Google dropped a part of their webmaster guidelines that recommended getting a link from DMOZ (and Yahoo).

But there may be life yet in DMOZ. Just last week, a post on the DMOZ blog hints that big upgrades are coming soon:

What does AOL have planned for DMOZ in the near future?
While it’s not quite ready for its prime-time debut, we can tell you that we’re actively working on an all-new DMOZ that incorporates an updated UI and an overhauled back-end infrastructure.

So, I’ll pose the question to you (those of you who aren’t busy at SMX East): Is it too late to save DMOZ? Can the Open Directory be revived and become more than just a “submit and forget it” link target?

Comments are open!

I’ve been living in directory submission land lately, looking for quality directories where I can submit my wife’s and my four local blogs, which are new and in need of some basic links.

It’s been a while since I’ve gone out on the hunt for links from quality directories, and the experience these past few days hasn’t been good: There’s a lot more junk out there than not. This can be a problem for the small business owner who may struggle to know how to tell a quality directory from the rest.

How to Judge a Web Directory

One directory I visited recently offered several different listing options, and the chart they presented offers a great starting point for learning how to separate the good from the bad. Have a look:

There are three red flags above that should tell you this is not a place from which you want a link:

1. Reciprocal link required. Quality directories (Yahoo, DMOZ, Best of the Web, Business.com, etc.) never make reciprocal linking a condition of getting listed. When you see this requirement, the message is clear: The directory wants inbound links more than it wants great sites to be listed.
2. 100% refund if not accepted. We can debate paid links until we’re blue in the face, but it’s reasonable to assume that search engines don’t consider this kind of arrangement to be a sign of a quality directory. For Google’s perspective, Matt Cutts has said, “For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.” If your payment guarantees inclusion, or you get a refund if rejected, you’re not paying for an evaluation of your site — you’re buying a link.
3. 3 extra blog links and 5 extra blog links. Along the same lines, if you’re offered more links in exchange for more money, that’s a red flag.

That’s just from this one screenshot from one directory. Here are five more red flags to look for when evaluating directories:

4. Lots of advertising. Just as there are Made-for-Adsense blogs, there are MFA directories. If the directory’s pages are heavy on ads, to the point of making the web site listings seem like an afterthought, avoid that directory. Quality directories focus most on the presentation of their listings.

5. Selling links. I recently saw a “submit URL” page on a directory in Niche “A”, and right below the submit button there was a paragraph with (obviously sold) links to mortgage, drugs, and other unrelated sites.

6. Poor quality sites being listed. Search the directory for spammy phrases like “buy viagra” and see what results show up. If you can search for domains, try searching for “blogspot.com” (home to thousands upon thousands of spam blogs). There are some legit and very good blogs on blogspot.com, so be sure to analyze the blogspot.com sites that are listed.

7. Poor crawl depth. Low-quality directories tend to have very poor crawl depth; in other words, the home page and main category pages might be in Google’s or Yahoo’s index, but many of the deeper pages aren’t. This means your link may have no benefits where SEO is concerned.

8. Low traffic. If you’re not getting a link for SEO reasons, you better hope to get some direct traffic from the link. Check sites like Compete, Quantcast, or Alexa to see what kind of traffic the directory might have. I wouldn’t rely on any one of these stats/metrics sites alone, but together you may get a good idea of the directory’s popularity.

Further Reading: Two Articles

Here are two excellent articles on this same topic that a small business owner should read for additional ideas on judging the quality of a web directory:

• Debra Mastaler: Is That Directory Worth Submitting To?
• Rand Fishkin: What Makes a Good Web Directory, and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones

Your Turn: What red flags did I miss? What factors do you use to determine the quality of a directory?

(What a week…is it really Friday?)

One of the best posts I’ve read all year: The Future of Communications – A Manifesto for Integrating Social Media into Marketing by Brian Solis. Yes, it’s long. Yes, it starts a bit slow. But you’ll be glad you read the whole thing very carefully.

And on a somewhat related note, but this one specifically as it relates to blogging, David Meerman Scott tells How to convince your boss to let you start a corporate blog.

I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with Larry Sullivan via e-mail a few times in recent months, often about local search issues. So, it’s nice to see his blog is up and running and going strong. Have a look at Local Biz Bits and subscribe to the feed. (Larry: may I be so bold as to suggest you drop the Snap.com link previews?)

This is pretty creative, and I’m willing to bet it works, too. On copyblogger, Michael Stelzner writes How to Improve Your Image by NOT Delivering. If you do any white paper or similar type of subscription-based lead generation, it’s worth your time.

Here’s something practical: Search Engine Journal shares a couple coupon codes to save money when submitting to the Aviva Directory and Best of the Web directory (both of which are on my directory submission list).

Two good ones this week from GrokDotCom: Start with Holly Buchanan’s Why Testimonials Do (and Don’t) Work, and then check out Start Multivariate Testing: 7 Critical Questions from Bryan Eisenberg.

I liked Stoney’s “Small is Beautiful” column on SEL this week: Stepping Stones Of User Conversions: A Step-By-Step Guide. I’ve got the next two weeks in that column and hope to come up with something as good.

I know a lot of small businesses are doing PPC, but I’m not sure how many here in the U.S. are doing PPC in other countries, or considering it. If you are, have a look at Pat Schaber’s Tips for Launching Paid Search Campaigns in Different Countries.

I’ve done a couple posts recently about the sometimes negative impact the Internet and technology has on some small businesses. Anita Campbell writes about The Trend of Small Retail Moving to the Web — how some small retailers are surviving by going to a Web only business arrangement.

That’s all for this week.

Now playing: “In My Place,” Coldplay (my Last.fm profile)

“We all want to be big, big stars … but we got different reasons for that”

Let’s start with a couple from one of my favorite topics: Local Search. First, Greg Sterling has an interesting write-up about an interesting search tool called “Palore” that can add a lot of valuable information to local search business listings. It’s worth watching. And second, Paul Jahn noticed Yahoo going out of its way to encourage more user reviews on Yahoo Local. I bet that kind of thing equates to an immediate 10-20% increase in reviews.

Eric Enge has a good checklist post with 17 Poor Quality Signals Your Site May Be Sending. You’ll have to fill-in some of the details yourself on any items you may not understand, but the list is a good place to get yourself started on what not to do.

I’m not sure I agree with “most underrated,” but information architecture is certainly close to the top of the list. Aaron Walls says it’s the most underrated component of effective search marketing.

Comprehensive resource lists make such good linkbait. Here’s one from Daniel S. on the Sponsored Reviews blog: Giant List of Blog Directories.

And speaking of directories… Deb Mastaler lists a few in her SEL column this week about starting your linkbuilding with “foundational links.” The article is Foundational Links Don’t Split, Crack Or Get Dugg Up.

Lastly, here are two pieces that aren’t directly search-related, but still caught my attention: On Small Business Branding, Steve Woodruff writes How to Be Unremarkable. And over on Marketing Profs, Allen Weiss asks Is Price *Really* the Most Important Factor in Consumer Loyalty? He answers it, too.

That’s all for this week. Hope you have a great holiday weekend! See ya next week….

Now playing: “Mr. Jones,” Counting Crows

It was more than four months ago that I reported about what looked like the closure of the bCentral Small Business Directory. Today, MSN sent out an email to directory participants detailing what we suspected all along: It’s being retired.

But, the language in their bCentral transition FAQ is more than a bit confusing.

Effective May 18th 2006 at 3:00pm Pacific Daylight Time, the bCentral™ Small Business Directory will be retired. In its place, we are offering existing Submit It! customers and others who currently have a bCentral Small Business Directory listing a free, grandfathered listing in the new Microsoft Small Business Directory. While we will be preserving the current directory’s link friendliness and search ranking value, slight changes will be made in the way the directory appears to the public and how you may alter your listing.

That makes it sound like a new directory will be coming along to replace the bCentral SBD. But if I’m reading it correctly, “Microsoft Small Business Directory” is just a new name for this same directory, but it’ll be read-only (as it’s been since November), and perhaps most importantly, there’s no guarantee it’ll be online beyond the end of 2008.

If you read that differently, please speak up in the comments….

[tags]sbd, microsoft[/tags]

And she’s buying a stairway to linkheaven…

Hot off the presses is a good post from Loren Baker within the last couple hours titled Link Building : Measuring Directory Value. He sums up another discussion on the topic and adds in a few additional ideas and resources.

Lee Odden, one of my former interviewees, has a short and sweet list of 10 ways to use press releases as marketing tools.

Most folks have been saying for a long time that Alexa stats are about as valuable as a $3 bill. Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig, proves it.

Lisa likes to talk about how she never posts anything that has actual search value on the Bruce Clay blog, but I caught her breaking that rule this week: Which Is Better For SEO: Shared or Dedicated IPs. Look at her tossing all those percentages and stats around just as casual as can be….

How about 15 helpers to spruce up your blog with images? Philipp (one L, two Ps) shares Tips for Using Images in Blogs. I’ll get Philipp’s first name right the more I link to his posts….

And finally, a real timely post (for me, at least) from Neil Patel, with Let Friends Help You Get on Reddit. I just created a Reddit account about a week ago, so I’ll gladly take all the help Neil (and others) can give.

That’s all for this Friday night – hope you have a great weekend.

Now playing: “A Month of Sundays,” Don Henley

I’m in the middle of re-designing my wife’s real estate web site, which has sat dormant for too long now. I’m hardly a master designer, but we can do better than that 2004 version.

She’s also trying a lot of new things to market her web site, like writing a real estate blog and trying to market it and make connections via MyBlogLog.

Getting links has been a challenge. Her site has a DMOZ listing, but we never paid for a Yahoo Directory listing. We will now, thanks to Yahoo’s addition of a NOYDIR tag, which was finally announced today.

The tag prevents Yahoo’s natural search SERPs from using the title and description from a Yahoo Directory listing. It may not be something that every business needs to use, but in a list of real estate web sites, I’d rather be able to control how the listing looks with our own page title, rather than just having her name show up.

So, for us, this was the last hurdle. Now that we know the directory listing’s title and description won’t start showing up in the natural SERPs, we’ll pay that $299 and hope to benefit from having one more trusted link, not to mention any direct traffic it might bring. Of course, we’ll do this as soon as I finish the new site…….

More discussion about the Yahoo announcement is available on Search Engine Roundtable, where Barry isn’t sure he’ll use the tag or not. Danny also has lots of details and background at Search Engine Land.

[tags]yahoo, yahoo directory[/tags]

Background: Microsoft recently closed its Small Business Directory (SBD) to new submissions, and the Open Directory (DMOZ) has essentially been offline since before Halloween. There’s no indication that the SBD will be back, and many are wondering if DMOZ will survive the current downtime.

Current: For some reason, this is not getting much “big picture” attention in our industry. But here’s why it matters: Within the last couple months, we’ve lost two of the three most trusted directories on the web.

You want trust?

• Both date back to 1999.
• Yahoo counts more than 10 million backlinks for DMOZ and more than 19,000 for SBD.
• Both traditionally have PageRanks in the 7-9 range.
• DMOZ is referenced more than 2,000 times on Wikipedia.
• Google has, for a long time now, recommended the Open Directory/DMOZ in its Webmaster Guidelines material.
• About a year ago, Andy Hagans listed both DMOZ and SBD as two of his “gimme” directories for listing a new site…
• and then listed SBD as a highly trusted link just a couple months ago.

So, yeah, no matter what you think personally of directories, the fact is we’re all losing a couple sources of trusted links.

Impact? I imagine there are smiles on the faces of the Yahoo Directory team right about now. That $299 submission fee suddenly seems a lot more reasonable expense, and necessary, than it did before.

Beyond the Yahoo Directory, the loss of DMOZ and SBD should also impact directories that are at the next trust level down. Business.com, Best of the Web, GoGuides, JoeAnt, Skaffe.com, and the Starting Point Directory all become more important and worthy of consideration.

Where before we could rely on a couple well-known directories for trusted links, now there’s Yahoo … and everybody else.

Related: Directory listings and trusted links aren’t the only things impacted by what’s going on now. Donna at SEO Scoop posted yesterday about the DMOZ situation: Trickle down effect of a dying DMOZ? Great food for thought there….

[tags]seo, directories, dmoz, open directory, msn bcentral, small business directory[/tags]