DMOZ Has A Blog (Whooptee-Frickin’-Doo)

For those of you who thought DMOZ was dead (including me), check this out. They’ve got a frickin’ blog.

This may be just a feeble attempt to rescue DMOZs relevance, or it might be a prop by Google execs. Then too, it could be a legitimate attempt by DMOZ to maintain its historic reputation as a directory.

Personally, I think most directories are not necessary. Yahoo!, obviously, is an exception. But what makes Yahoo! the exception is the fact that it owns a search engine (Inktomi) and offers other services that are of benefit to webmasters all over the world. DMOZ does not own a search engine nor does it have anything to offer webmasters other than a free listing in a high PR directory. But as the Web grows in all directions, that particular benefit gets less and less valuable.

Why Directories Are History

The reason I say that is because you can build links, thousands of highly valuable links, in the time that it takes you to get listed in DMOZ using your own blog and some article marketing. It used to be that you would put up a website and the first thing you’d do is list it in DMOZ. You’d be listed in a couple of weeks and DMOZs high PR would benefit you a lot more quickly. Then the search engines would crawl your website and you’d get those high search engine positions that everyone coveted. That’s not the way the web works any more.

Now, you build a website and add a blog. You do a little social marketing and get other bloggers to link to yours. This isn’t necessarily done to gain PR, but to gain traffic to your blog. Then you start a PPC campaign and an article marketing campaign and start driving targeted traffic to your website and your blog. Because you blog every day and you attract free links from cool people who own websites with high PR, you can get your website crawled by the search engines long before you get listed in DMOZ. Since it takes about six months to get listed in DMOZ (that’s if the gods are smiling at you), you can achieve a PR 3 or 4 by the time you get listed and while that one link might still benefit you it is more likely that you’ve got so many other great links going for you due to all of your marketing efforts, that one single link isn’t going to tip the scales in your favor by much.

I say it’s a good thing that DMOZ has a blog. But they showed up a little late for the party and now all the pretty girls are gone. Besides, I can’t even trackback to it. What good is that?