DMOZ with nofollow?

Hello,

I just want to hear about what you would think about something we talked on DP forums.

Since DMOZ does not have a task to serve backlinks for websites, and only purpose is to provide a spam-free internet guide for people, then you can add a "nofollow" tag to outlinks. That way noone will benefit the links but people who actually want to visit these sites over DMOZ.

What people complain about DMOZ is; beyond the guidelines, every editor has his/her own way of doing things, good or bad, ethical or not, there's no "DMOZ style". And audition of editors is just impossible due to the amount. So if editors are only volunteers to help improve directory, and DMOZ only aims to serve an internet guide, not a free? version of Dollarlinking or a toplist or something, "nofollow" should be very okay.

If it is added, editor applications will decrease like hell you know it, and why would it? Do editors care about the future pagerank of the websites(they are not related to) they add to their categories? Neh..

This does not cover the whole indeed, but this is what majorly going on and majority is what counts, so i believe a nofollow would let DMOZ recruit decent editors and all the complaints about double standards/abusement would fade away.

I'd be grateful if meta's share their thoughts over this.

Thank you

I think there has been some internal discussion about this, but since I know nothing about page rank (including what the pr is of pages I visit - I don't use the kind of browser that shows it) I'm not the best person to comment

I'm not a meta, but what the heck is a DP forum, and why would we care about what they discuss over there?

> I just want to hear about what you would think about something we talked on DP forums.
ROFL
Believe me you don't want to hear what we think about something that is talked on DP.

> then you can add a "nofollow" tag to outlinks.
Just do a search on this forum and read what has already been said about this subject.
Short conclusion: there is no reason to put nofollow on the links as it would have no effect on what DMOZ is doing.
Remember that the DMOZ own directory is only a secondary product, the real product is the RDF which everybody can use to build a directory. How are you going to force all those other people (including Google) to include the nofollow tag?

I don't know what's your problem with DP forums, and it doesn't really matter to me i'm just stating an opinion, doesn't matter where it was talked really.

And this has a lot to do with DMOZ, because it'd affect editor applications, only people who are actually volunteer to help improve this directory would join, other abusers would just atop applying or the ones who already joined would fade away.

And about the secondary product thing, DMOZ as website is the main content and duplicates aren't much of a deal, so RDF is not the case here. It's the link they get from DMOZ website is what people benefit. And it's not a million dollar improvement it's just a tag you'll add within the links, it clearly has some benefits since you don't serve a backlink source, and it has no side affect for you so i dont see why you'd oppose to this. I mean people who care about DMOZ as a directory, not a way to promote their own websites.

Thank you

>And about the secondary product thing, DMOZ as website is the main content and duplicates aren't much of a deal, so RDF is not the case here.

That's not our perspective. Licensees such as AOL, Alexa, and Google shouldn't be dismissed lightly.

>It's the link they get from DMOZ website is what people benefit.

No, that's not true in any useful sense. People benefit from the ODP by finding information that they were looking for. Anything else is accidental and irrelevant -- not worth a gnat's spit of attention from people who have something worth doing.

>And it's not a million dollar improvement

It's not an improvement at all, it's an utter irrelevance.

>it clearly has some benefits since you don't serve a backlink source,

That's no benefit to any editor or any user of the ODP.

>and it has no side affect for you

True.

>so i dont see why you'd oppose to this.

What you should recognize that you're not seeing, is any reason why any honest person would WANT this. We know EXACTLY why the link-spammers want it so badly. But they aren't us.

>I mean people who care about DMOZ as a directory, not a way to promote their own websites.

They would have no imaginable reason to care about this.

> That's no benefit to any editor or any user of the ODP.

If there's no benefit for any of the ODP editors, can you tell me there'd be same amount of editor applications if the links they add were nofollowed? Be honest.

> People benefit from the ODP by finding information that they were looking for.

If DMOZ is only a directory to help people what they look for, then there's no need of providing backlinks for websites, people will find those websites thru DMOZ whether the link is nofollow or not.

And i'm not saying every DMOZ editor is an abuser, but appreciate you can't talk about trust when there are such a large amount of editors much less when you only pick them through a simple application form.

So if DMOZ only has the purpose to serve people a spam-free internet guide, there is no reason not to add a nofollow tag which will not do any harm to your purpose. I think a higher management should review this sort of opinions because people react so badly to such an opinion which makes me think everybody is concerned about their backlinks..

>can you tell me there'd be same amount of editor applications if the links they add were nofollowed?

I have absolutely no reason to believe that there would be any causal relationship at all. And as for being honest: it's hard for me to believe that you aren't aware that Google directory DOESN'T use nofollow. Eh? And, last time I heard, it had a higher PR than dmoz.org....

There's only one reason any reasonable person needs, to ignore fatuous suggestions like this: so long as lint collects on blankets, everyone on earth has more productive things to do with their time.

But you've made your suggestion, you've taken your cheap character shots, any bystanders who're interested have heard the truth. Any further discussion of the proposal would have to be done by the technical staff.