The Impact of Dying Directories

Filed in Directories by Matt McGee on December 14, 2006

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?

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]

Comments (6)

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  1. vikont says:

    SBD seems to be closed for new accounts only.
    Our new website submitted to them two days ago is succesfully approved and listed.

  2. Matt McGee says:

    Hi vikont – to make sure I understand what you’re saying, are you an existing SBD account holder? And you were able to add a new web site this week?

  3. jamestcs says:

    I think ODP is facing some problems on hardware issue… it happened number of times in the past and normally take 1-2 months to ractify.

  4. inactivist says:

    Nature (and the ‘net) abhors a vacuum. Perhaps not the same as the ‘trusted’ DMOZ and MS directories – but it seems that there are pretenders to the throne:

    http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=20453

    If wikipedia is any indication, this has the potential to become a very high-ranking system.

  5. Matt McGee says:

    I don’t know, inactivist…. Seems like every year someone claims to have a “Google killer” in development, and it never happens. A search engine built heavily on user input seems like a spammer’s heaven.

  6. frenchguy says:

    I was a Dmoz editor before….but lately i seldom go in to edit website due to the website’s access problem……and you guess what? i was disabled to acess anymore because of “inactive” for long time not editing 🙁