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February 13, 2006

How to Get Your Site Listed in DMOZ in Record Time

Getting your site listed in DMOZ is one of those holy grail achievements in Internet Marketing. It gives you a link from a trusted, reputable source, and one that's highly valued by search engines. What's more, it also gets your site listed in Google's own directory.

I've been doing SEO consulting full-time for about 3 years now, and I've submitted a lot of sites to DMOZ. While I've had numerous sites added within a few days or weeks, there are plenty of other sites I've submitted well over a year ago that have yet to be included.

That got me thinking: Why do some sites pop into DMOZ with almost no waiting, while others languish in the queue for a year or more (or never get in at all)?

A recent thread over at Resource-Zone (the DMOZ editor's forum) helped provide some answers.

In that thread, some of the editors seem to almost revel in the fact that they don't consider submissions to be an important way to find new sites to add to the DMOZ. Instead, they prefer to hunt down sites on their own, looking for the best sites to flesh out some of the underdeveloped niches in the directory.

The simple fact is this: Most DMOZ editors could not give two rips about boosting your site's PageRank or helping you outrank your competition by giving you a trusted link from a site Google respects. Rather, they're trying to create a comprehensive guide to the best sites on the Internet.

Note that they're not trying to list all the sites on the Internet; just the best ones.

With that in mind, here's a few tips that might help speed up that next DMOZ submission:

  • Find categories that are underpopulated. If the category you want to be listed in already contains 100 sites, there's very little incentive for an editor to add your site. They've already done their job and provided a large list of useful resources for that category. Unless your site offers something really special that the others don't, your chances of being listed are slim. On the other hand, editors are often eager to flesh out sparsely populated categories.

  • Become an editor of an underdeveloped category. A friend of mine (who has no interest in SEO) was able to become an editor fairly quickly recently by choosing a neglected niche that they had expertise and interest in. Those big popular categories are jealously guarded by the existing editors. You have nil chance of breaking in there. Find something less competitive.

  • Have a good site that offers some valuable content. There's not always going to be an underdeveloped niche that's right for you site. In that case, you're going to need to have some really good content. Cookie cutter sites won't, um, cut it. If you want to get into those big categories, it helps to be unique, not redundant. At the very least, have some good articles on your site.

    • As link-building guru Eric Ward recently remarked:

    For me it’s about the content. Can I help the content get known or not? I don't care if it’s a FORTUNE 500 company or a mom and pop site. If the content is about a specific topic and well done, then it deserves to be known and linked. If the content is crap, even if it’s produced by a large corporation, then why bother? It’s not me that gets the links for the content; it’s the content itself that earns the link. I'm just a conduit.

That quote doesn't actually have anything to do with the DMOZ, but you replace the word "link" with "directory listing," I think it accurately sums up the perspective many DMOZ editors are using to list new sites.

In my experience, the more information-rich the site, and the less overtly commercial, the faster it got listed. There's always going to be exceptions, of course (like this blog, which has been dangling in the queue for quite some time), but following these rules does tend to drastically speed things up.

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