DMOZ - Why so important?

[Lasher]

Lots of scanning services include a field for whether or not a domain is listed in DMOZ, and quite often in sales threads I see "DMOZ listed!" as a selling point.

I don't know anyone that actually uses DMOZ as a search engine. Why is it considered so important? I guess I'm lucky that DMOZ not only listed aardwolf.com but gave it a "cool site" star and a nice little banner to put on the site, but I still don't get why it's considered a big deal.

Appreciate any insight into this. Thanks!

 

[tetrapak]

Dmoz, is one of the most important and biggest directories, they only accept quality sites. This is a good indication for a potential buyer, that your site is worth something, content wise. Also Dmoz.org is PR8, which means, your site has a quality PR8 backlink, this also improves your PR.

 

[Redleg]

DMOZ data is used by a lot of other directories/sites, so you can potentially get (at least) 100-200 backlinks from other sites from having just 1 DMOZ listing...

 

[Peter]

As well as the very valid point Redleg has made I can also guarantee that you have got results from DMOZ before.

Presumably you do use Google as a search engine. Google get (or did get) a lot of results from DMOZ and they were/are more likely to give it a higher ranking if it is listed on DMOZ.

I think 1 of the main reasons Google do/did give it such importance was because the acceptance of the listings is very strict. Even using bad grammar in the submission can stop it being accepted. Also the submissions are accepted by humans and not by an automated system so each site can be properly checked out before being accepted.

 

[dgridley]

DMOZ is a feather in your cap because all submissions are human reviewed before being accepted.. good point in your favor.

 

[verbster]

DMOZ also offers/links to domain news and more: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/renewals/

 

[whitebark]

Their add url service has been down for many days now. Useless...

 

[accent]

It took many months for two of my sites to get accepted - and then I only found out about it when DMOZ started showing up in "refering sites". I get about one or two visitors per month directly, but their listings are public domain so lots of other sites pick them up. That PR8 is divided between so many links it does not seem to matter.

 

[Lasher]

Thanks for the comment all, guess I'll keep that little banner on the site.