The ODP (Open Directory Project) has closed today. For that reason, did we also closed all traffic services from DMOZ.

The Open Directory Project, known under DMOZ, was considered to be the best-maintained website directory and now retires after almost 19 years.

The DMOZ was launched approximately in June 1998 under the name Gnuhoo and has ever since ever increasingly expanded. It has been manually managed by a large number of voluntary editors and has been recognized by Google as a high-quality directory.

The DMOZ as a link source

Also with many SEO’s the DMOZ was regarded as a very important linkprovider, since on this directory several websites served. By recording this directory, you could get hundreds of links from other websites that were mostly not high quality, but still fit well into almost every linkbuilding strategy. A link in the Open Directory Project could be worth a lot of gold and was therefore very popular.

Google has even used the time to display the search results for the Meta Descriptions on the Open Directory Project, and the information it contains is then partially displayed as a website description in the search results. This could be prevented by the meta parameter NOODP.

One of the last great directories

After the Yahoo Directory has already been closed, the Open Directory Project now has one of the last man-made directories to follow this path. Of course there are still niche directories, which are maintained by hand or also numerous industry books in the area of ​​B2B. But such a large directory as the DMOZ is there in the sense then no longer.

Why is it closed?

Little is known about the reasons for this decision. It is still speculated that too many editors buy themselves and for money, had entered websites into the largest directory which were actually not suitable for it.

Some editors created a mirror page of the ODP in which you can (however, currently) no more websites be registered.

[kkstarratings]