DMOZ is Corrupt? I don’t think so

The major forums seem to have nasty little threads popping up left, right and centre about corruption at DMOZ. It’s hard to believe there’s anything other than the occasional individual having a go, but some are claiming orchestrated campaigns.

It’s fairly well known that I’m a DMOZ editor yet I’ve never been approached by any stranger – and friends have only asked once or twice for info about a submission. Luckily they’re interested in categories beyond my influence but I’d have no problems saying no, either.

Now, I’m not posting here so I can get people asking me for “favours”, after all if you stick your head above the crowd you have to be squeaky clean. I’m fine with that.

My only request is people stop bagging DMOZ and get on with their lives. Sooner or later the other directories like Skaffe, JoeAnt and Jayde will start letting people clone their data – after all that’s the major advantage of being in DMOZ: you automatically get shown in countless other sites and Google considers each a unique inbound link. You certainly don’t get listed in DMOZ for the PageRank. Auckland is only PR5 and by the time you get to actual listing pages the PR has died away altogether.

The evidence is always sketchy although the finger has been pointed at one specific editor (hardly a wave of activity) and the DMOZ Top Listed Domains list over at the normally reliable whois.sc.

As an example CNN has many thousands of listings including their review of Harry Potter and Sorcerer’s Stone.

Now, I’m with anyone who thinks it’s mad to have a category for the reviews of each and every movie that actually makes it to the cinema but surely the problem is with the decision to have the category, not in the fact that a valid review gets listed?

Then there are the adult sites such as www.nude-teen-sex-pic.com with 65 listings. They seem to have much of their content listed when infact the site should have a single listing in a category which describes the whole of the site. And why do they call them “adult” anyway when they only ever seem to cater for “men”?

There are other examples of multi listings where I can’t find a listing at all, so how has whois got their data? Perhaps they are tracking the final url and someone has some nasty little redirects going. Who knows? But if I find out I’ll post it here.

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7 Comments

  1. July 14, 2005

    “Sooner or later the other directories like Skaffe, JoeAnt and Jayde will start letting people clone their data…”

    You are very correct on that. It may be coming sooner than one thinks. 😉

  2. August 26, 2005

    dmoz.org erweitern. Warum nur?

    F?r das Marketing von Websites ist dmoz auf jeden Fall relevant, weil Google einen Eintrag in dmoz wichtig nimmt und eingetragene Sites gegen&uumlber nicht gelisteten bevorzugt. Ein eher unbekannter Teil von Google, das Google-Verzeichnis, ist wie sehr…

  3. September 30, 2005

    It would be nice to see certain people leave it alone, but I doubt that it will ever happen. The sad thing is that the time people waste bashing the ODP over and over again could be spent getting their site listed (by making changes or additions) or finding other quality sources of listings for their site.

  4. October 19, 2005

    Ah man, I’ve taken a hammering over the last few days by a “Sridhar Kondoji” claiming I’m a corrupt editor. I’ve been surprised by his anger and am quite glad that he’s in the States and I only have to worry about the words Sri Kondoji writes.

    It’s been heartening to receive support from people who “know” me well enough to know that I don’t need to stoop so low. The editors, ofcourse, can see the evidence and make their own minds up. The others don’t have that insight so it’s nice that they still have confidence in me. 🙂

  5. Julian
    August 11, 2006

    I am a DMOZ editor too and unfortunately the talks about corruption in DMOZ is very true. It is a simple question, if the admins and Metas have nothing to hide then why the will not implement an open system and deal with accusations?
    Why DMOZ is not open to recruit more editors and make new procedures which stops the deep linking abuse?
    Why is it the a porn site can get hundreds of links while others can not even can get one? Why sites that are nothing but affiliate doorway pages get many listings?
    You can push your head in the sand and pretend that there is no abuse but as long as honest editors will not stand up and fight, the abuse will continue.

  6. Jerome Black
    March 23, 2007

    Hum, has this led anywhere yet?

  7. August 17, 2007

    Very interesting topic people. As a webmaster I am always trying and exploring new ways to promote and bring larger levels of traffic to my websites. To hear that dmoz is corrupt, what chances do the small man have.

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