The Impact of Dying Directories
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]
SBD seems to be closed for new accounts only.
Our new website submitted to them two days ago is succesfully approved and listed.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 🙁