Submitting a Site to DMOZ

The Open Directory Project, aka DMOZ is a directory that has intrigued webmasters from the very beginning.

Claims that a listing within this directory is a must if you want to rank well in the search engines is still being perpetuated, and the less someone knows, the more important this really seems.

After you’ve been around for awhile, you soon realize that getting into DMOZ is not what it was touted to be, nor have you sky-rocketed in the search engines as a result of it.

It’s just another link. It might have some authority factor – the listing is human edited prior to inclusion and the search engines to take this into account. How much emphasis is placed on this is relatively unknown, but most feel it’s diminishing as search engine algorithms evolve and they become less reliant on the human factor.

It doesn’t hurt to submit a site for inclusion and may actually help your site a little. So let’s look at the process and submit a site to the Open Directory Project.

The site we’ve chosen to submit is Furniture Care Tips (furniturecaretips.com) and from reviewing their submission guidelines, it appears that this site meets the standards for inclusion. It’s not an affiliate site or over-run with advertising and it provides rich, unique content that’s generally not found on other sites (we don’t know about the scrapers so we tend to generalize).

Our first step is to find a suitable category, and I’ve located two that might be applicable to our site:

Home – Consumer Information – Home and Family – Furniture
Home – Home Improvement – Furniture

Reviewing the first category the description states:

Place sites in this category that rate, rank, or compare furniture brands, or that give consumers tips and advice regarding furniture construction or styles.

That’s not quite what our site is about, so we move on to the second category:

This category contains sites that offer advice for the care and maintenance of furniture, or that offer innovative suggestions for designing furniture for the home.

This is right on target for our content, so we can move on to the submission form.

Site URL: http://www.furniturecaretips.com
Title of Site: Furniture Care Tips
This is the official title of the site and excludes promotional language. Review the guidelines for titles before crafting yours.

Description: Provides tips, suggestions, articles and a searchable furniture and woodworking directory for consumers, hobbyists and professionals.

Pretty concise, doesn’t use any promotional language or strings of keywords. It’s likely the description will be edited before acceptance, but it’s possible it will be accepted as is because it seems like it complies with the guidelines for descriptions.

Everything looks good so far – click submit, wait a bit – confirmation page. Done.

The submission to the Open Directory Project is completed. There will be no notification that the submission was received, accepted or rejected. Don’t let it bother you – they really don’t matter.

Think about it – if your site is rejected, it’s not likely to be accepted if you resubmit it, which is what you’d probably do.

Now it’s time to move on to the more important aspects of promoting your site and forget about the dmoz submission. There’s no point obsessing about it’s status. Seriously.

If your curiosity gets you, go back and search for your URL after about 6-12 months. If it’s not listed, don’t sweat it as it can take a couple of years before an editor reviews your submission. Get back to promoting your site – that’s what’s really important.

If you check the search results for some terms related to the site we just submitted such as furniture care or antique furniture care, it’s easy to see that a DMOZ listing is not a requirement to ranking well in Google.

It’s time to now forget about DMOZ and go check out some other great directories or work on improving and promoting your web sites. Seriously.

  1. aviva’s avatar

    Good tips about submitting to DMOZ. However, I disagree with this statement:

    “It’s just another link. It might have some authority factor – the listing is human edited prior to inclusion and the search engines to take this into account. How much emphasis is placed on this is relatively unknown, but most feel it?s diminishing as search engine algorithms evolve and they become less reliant on the human factor.”

    I disagree about two things: authority and human factor.

    As to authority, just looking at the backlinks, domain age and SERPs that DMOZ has, it’s hard to believe that the site doesn’t have much authority. In fact, normally getting an authority link is quite difficult; whereas, as you have outlined, it’s pretty straight forward process to get a link on DMOZ. So, DMOZ remains one of the easiest to get authority links that are out there.

    As to human factor, if anything I believe that Google is relying on this more and more. Backlinks can be easily obtained, but if the human validation of a site’s backlinks isn’t there, there can be problems and this will only grow over time. Google is tracking click throughs in SERPs, traffic through Google Analytics, blog subscribers and more.

    That being said, a good post and the bottom line advice is absolutely spot on: a DMOZ listing is only one miniscule component of any site’s success.

  2. hvizdak’s avatar

    “It’s time to now forget about DMOZ and go check out some other great directories or work on improving and promoting your web sites. Seriously. ”

    No. Just because your site isn’t listed in DMOZ, there is no reason to say so. There is no greater directory than DMOZ. I don’t have all of my sites listed there (which is normal), but DMOZ listing helps a lot.

    Your post misses one basic aspect… It is negative. If I were you, I would use two points of view. Let’s take one site which isn’t listed in dmoz and let’s take another which is the first one’s competitor. Compare these cases. Then it’s time to write a post…

  3. Fuzzuck’s avatar

    hvizdak – if you’ll read the post again, it mentions that once you’ve submitted it’s time to forget about it and and look for other opportunities to promote your site.

    Once you’ve completed the submission process, there’s nothing more you can really do when it comes to dmoz.

    I think you’ve missed the point. 😉

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