Does Google even “use” them anymore? I’m way far out of the seo details loop to know that. What I do know, is that for years I’ve heard nothing but bad from DMOZ and their “editors”.
Now we have extortion? It’s time for Google to step up and simply drop DMOZ from having any relevance. Simply stop indexing it or using it as a base, or whatever.
Will Google listen? What do you think?
There is a big DMOZ (Open Directory) kerfuffle going on at Jeremy Schoemaker’s ShoeMoney blog over an alleged extortion attempt by a DMOZ editor.
A while back I got a email from a guy claiming to be a DMOZ editor saying that I had to pay him $5,000.00 or he would have my site: shoemoney.com removed from the dmoz.
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
Here’s the Shoemoney story.
Jim, I’m not sure about the veracity of the original story. There’s no evidence of this supposed extortion email although Mr Schoemaker has been quite open at sharing other things. (His disclaimer even states, in a tongue-in-cheek way, that we should expect that everything on his site is a lie.) I just had someone check his site’s DMOZ record for me and apparently a bribe was offered by him to editors in 2005, though how that came about is unclear. My guess is Mr Schoemaker is hiding something, or this was a blog entry designed to bait others in the blogosphere.
Even regular Joes like me will share dodgy email, headers intact, when I get mad at something. Sometimes I’ll omit the name of the sender but I will still paste the actual wording from the message.
My own experience with DMOZ is that the editors are pretty good, though that was a few years ago, and a revamped version where everyday people can vote on sites might be an idea.
DMOZ was one of the first sites online that made me believe the Internet was a really good thing. Over time it just sorta died out. I don’t know if Jeremy ‘Shoemoney’ is playing around or not, but DMOZ is sadly dead and needs to be revamped or dumped.
I think my point remains that Google doesn’t need the dmoz at all any longer, right? Do they? So they should just dump it in public and the whole thing will become irrelevant.