DMOZ vs. Google Directory

Can anyone explain the differences between the DMOZ and Google directories? We have our site listed in DMOZ, but it does not appear in the Google directory, and Google does not show a link from DMOZ to our site. I thought that the google directory fed straight from DMOZ.
I would appreciate any assitance that anyone can provide on this. Thanks in advance.

There is no direct feed. Every week (or so) rdf.dmoz.org posts a "RDF" file with all the current ODP categories and listings. Every month (or so) Google picks up a copy and eventually installs it on their servers.

Bugs, gremlins, glitches, etc., can interfere with either end of this process. Currently our RDF is being churned out "more or less OK, at least in the English-language categories", but Google hasn't installed one for several months -- for reasons unknown to us. Possibly it's something as simple as that they haven't gotten around to tweaking their scripts to access our shiny new RDF server. Possibly they are having issues with UTF encoding (as we are.) There have been multi-month haituses like this before; we have no reason to believe this one won't also eventually end with a new RDF installed at Google.

A bit more precisely: It seems like Google has actually used one or more RDFs in the meantime. Some search results show that rather new entries are listed in the google directory. BUT: If you click on the displayed link to the category, this page is in an older state...

For those that care, and who kept on bugging the ODP about it -- the Google Directory updated today:

http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=12159

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/18040.htm

I wouldn't go so far as to say that.

I was looking at the newly updated Google directory this morning and noticed that, in some categories, there were many sites listed with a Google PageRank (PR) of zero. At first, I did not understand why since, obviously, these sites had to have at least one link from the ODP, and thus should not have PR0. Looking at several of these sites, I then realized why: many were dead links, abandoned, or redirected sites. That made me think that ODP editors could take advantage of the Google directory when it is freshly updated to get rid of a whole bunch of bad listings. Are some of you doing that to rapidly clean up your favorite categories? Of course, you would still have to check each of these sites manually, but this could greatly speed up the process of cleaning a category.

Given that Google is taking advantage of the hard work done by the ODP editors, it would be good if the ODP could in turn use the fact that Google spiders the web regularly to improve the ODP directory.

Just my

We do.

The little green ball at the bottom of category pages is a link to the corresponding category in Google. It's there so we can get a quick look at what sites might have problems.

Not every branch or sub-branch has fairly active editors. If you notice an area that is really bad let us know and someone will soon be off to clean it up.

Wow! Neat! I had never noticed the use of the little green ball at the bottom. Thanks for the tip, Lisa.

It's also perhaps worth pointing out that a new system that can help zap bad URLs more quickly was put in place over the weekend, which won't have made it into Google's latest update. Quite a bit of fluff has been removed this past week as a result.

If however, these sites with PR0 do still appear on the public pages of dmoz.org and they don't work, either email the editor of the category (or an editor of a category higher up the tree) with the links, or post in the 'Abuse Reporting' forum here. In future, we hope to have a 'report dead link' system that will allow the public to alert us to URLs that have died.

Using the Googledirectory in that way can be useful, but has not been possible due to the fact that Google took over 6 months to do the latest update (it used to be monthy).

If they revert to their old monthly schedule, then that would be neat, and you will see big changes between the new Google directory and the next one to come.