I was a bit bored today and checked out a couple of blogs I haven’t visited in a while, like ShoeMoney’s blog. I noticed a pretty interesting post on his blog about the open directory project, DMOZ.
ShoeMoney says he got an e-mail a while back from a guy who claimed to be a DMOZ editor and that he had to pay $5,000 or else shoemoney.com would be removed from DMOZ.
When someone would send me an e-mail like that I would probably laugh, I would think *nice try* and delete it immediately. But it turned out that this wasn’t a scam, the guy really was a (corrupt) DMOZ editor:
I thought nothing of it…. then today I got a email from him saying it was removed and I might want to rethink not paying him. I thought I would check just for grins.
It was removed… WOW
dmoz… corrupt… no…..
I heard lots of stories about DMOZ and how it has become worse and worse of the years – I heard stories about bribery before but not about a DMOZ extortion. Lots of people don’t like DMOZ anymore but still most want to get in there.
Not because it sends a shitload of visitors to your site, definitely not, I don’t think any of my sites receives more than a handful of visitors through DMOZ every year. The real value of being in DMOZ is that Google likes this directory – they use the data for their Google Directory and it’s believed that being in DMOZ will give you a slight boost in Google’s algorithm.
Anyway I agree with ShoeMoney’s stand that Google should drop DMOZ. Like someone in Shoe’s comment section said it’s pretty funny to see that Google frowns so much upon paid links while they’re still happily using data from the corrupt DMOZ directory.
2 responses to “DMOZ is corrupt”
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[…] couple of days ago I wrote about ShoeMoney’s bad experience with DMOZ. Basically some corrupt editor demanded $5,000 from ShoeMoney or else his listing would be […]