Goodbye DMOZ

[Dani]

Looks like Dmoz is shutting its doors for good. Who is going to miss the open source directory project aka Google Directory? Being listed in there used to be awesome for SEO!! I wonder if I'm going to lose the backlinks now.

[cereal]

It is really sad, I have used a lot and I have been a volunteer editor for few years sometime ago. Is there anything else similar?

[Dani]

There can't be anything similar I'm afraid. Not since Google declared war on directories. If Google doesn't like it ... well, just look at forums.

I mean, of course there's still local directories like Yelp that come with reviews, of course.

My friends run https://botw.org/ but they claimed it was dying a slow death 5+ years ago. They switched to making the majority of their revenue from their local directory at https://local.botw.org/ back then. I'm not sure if it's still their primary source of income though. It looks like they now have https://bestoftheweb.com/ which appears to be a non-directory and completely different revenue model that they didn't have back then, ... so there's that.

[Dani]

It's all about the pivot. Look at Dazah.

[Lisa_11]

Yes we will miss them. I have some backlinks from Dmoz. But now I have to lose those backlinks.

[DavidB]

Yes, I will miss them too. I got some links in there a LONG time ago, and they were left in through many edits, clean-outs, removal of garbage, etc. I had hoped, since much of the garbage was gone, the directory would live on for a while.

I wonder what is left to indicate to the search engines what is a good site? I mean, the directories are gone. Forums don't count. Social bookmarking does nothing. Fifteen or twenty years ago, when the Internet was a novelty and everybody was an amateur webmaster, everybody had a "Favorite Links" page, where a person might get their site listed. Even that is gone. So what is everybody doing? Are they just using Facebook? Is that what the search engines rely on now?! Mentions in social media?! I hope that is not the case. Results would be distorted by all the teenagers on Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, etc. who don't dig too deep into a topic to examine what real quality is.

I am stumped. Not sure where to direct my SEO efforts now.

[Clinton_1]

I think that it is good riddance because DMOZ has not worked for quite a few years. The main reason being that many of the moderators didn't take the role seriously and lately submissions seldom turned into listings.

Apologies to the more conscientious moderators but I think that too many of the moderators were quick to take on the responsibility but slow to commit the time needed.

Mostly, the person making the submission never even got the courtesy of a response. The result was a poor service and ultimately but not surprisingly the demise of a potentially very powerful service.

[Otir]

Obviously, I missed the information (and it closed on March 14 so I am coming really "late" to the game!)

I hear it that Google does not like directories, so there it goes for those who did not pivot or diversify in time so that their model could be viable.

I love directories: I think that they are very valuable resources. A good resource will always need a human interaction and this is what made DMOZ so great... in the very beginning but it lost its human dimension when it did not maintain engagement.