RIP DMOZ – Local SEO Stalwart
DMOZ — The Open Directory Project that uses human editors to organise websites — is closing. It marks the end of a time when humans, rather than machines, tried to organise the web.
The announcement came via a notice that’s now showing on the home page of the DMOZ site, saying it will close as of March 14, 2017:
DMOZ was born in June 1998 and grew to rival Yahoo Directories. Later in 1998, AOL acquired Netscape, giving AOL control of The Open Directory.
Also born that year was Google, which was the start of the end of human curation of websites. Google bought both the power of being able to search every page on the web with the relevancy that was a hallmark of human-powered directories.
Dental Design has been using DMOZ since our inception in 2001. We’ve understood that even though search engines have taken over “sorting out the web” (or, indexing) through increasingly complex and astute algorithms, DMOZ provided a rare human edited directory, which Google attributed a lot of trust in. We don’t expect any adverse effects DMOZ’s demise.
Citation building and natural, relevant link building with other dental practices and local businesses, is just as prominent in building PageRank.
DMOZ will live on in one unique way — the NOODP meta tag. This was a way for publishers to tell Google and other search engines not to describe their pages using Open Directory descriptions. While the tag will become redundant, it will also remain to lurk within web pages that continue to use it for years to come.
Contact Dental Design to discuss improving your dental practice website PageRank on Google.
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