Way back in the day when the Internet was defiantly a Social experience web surfers depended on Link Archives to provide relevant links to information available on the internet.
At that time the use of search engines was limited if your information or contribution was going to be found it had to be in one of the large link indexes or there would be no possibility for anyone to find it.
To have your site archived meant submitting it manually and hoping that someone would visit your site and review it for inclusion. Today Google and all other Search Engines use robots that find information by using algorithms and unmanned bots that index results from all over the internet without the need for human intervention.
One of the main Link Archives that is still somewhat of a force today is DMOZ they generate link lists that are populated to thousands of sites and are often used by large search engines for indexing.
The unfortunate thing that has killed DMOZ is the same thing that made it special in its early years. You are dependent on people to add links to an index that is ever growing smaller in the scope of the internet. In addition if the volunteer that is assigned part of an index decides to not do their job there is no accountability.
Links that are Archived in DMOZ have been stale for a decade with many domains now returning dead sites or ones that have been parked and not updated for years.
There are some resources that are relevant and many of those links belong to the big names in any category. Also new sites are added and this is due to an individuals idea of which site they enjoy visiting so alongside of Twitter you may see links to Geocities accounts that are long dead.
So, why is this a problem? Why is a site that no one uses or cares about important to all web developers?
Search Engine Optimization by the big hitters us this index as part of their offering. Even Google simply republishes the DMOZ archive on their directory.
If your site is indexed in DMOZ with one link you can expect a 100% improvement on your Unique Visitors. If it is indexed in more then one location in their index this can either make or break a site.
The thing is that this is transparent.. that internet users are not visiting DMOZ and they are not visiting the API sites that redistribute the DMOZ archive they are getting links from search engines like Google.
Once the site is listed on DMOZ Google Bing Yahoo and other sites improve its rank exponentially and this happens no matter which site is indexed.
This is very unfortunate.
DMOZ is basically a dead archive. They no longer get the resources to maintain the index and the people they have committed to the archive have a sour outlook on life.
Look it is not our fault Netscape didn’t put Microsoft out of business… stop hating the world.. and close your doors for the good of the internet.
