The ODP effect on search engines

Very well put Hutcheson.

charlesleo said:

I think you're refering to sites that had too many outbound links - ones that would be considered 'link farming.' Google does not consider the ODP a 'link farm', otherwise they wouldn't recommend submitting a site to the ODP.

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Let's go over this again. The idea of TrustRank is to start with a group of sites which can be trusted. This is the seed set. A link from a trusted site confers 'trust'. The number of link from 'trust seeds' = TrustRank.

In the Stanford White Paper on Trust Rank the authors selected seeds via inverse PageRank (i.e. sites with many outbound links).

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The authors wanted their seed set of sites to have lots of outbound links. Otherwise TrustRank would be very limited indeed! So they used inverse PageRank to find an initial set of 25,000 sites. That set would certainly include Yahoo! Directory and the ODP, which have millions of outbound links. Unfortunately it also included a huge number of ODP clones, which raised the spam factor in the set.

To get rid of the spam, they removed from their initial set of 25,000 sites all those not listed in any of the major directories, cutting the pool down to 7,900.

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So they easily weeded out a lot of the spammier ODP clones, other spam directories and link farms. At this stage the Open Directory itself and Yahoo! Directory were presumably still in the set. But what comes next?

Then they manually evaluated the top 1,250 sites and selected 178 to be used as good seeds. They selected only sites with a clearly identifiable authority (such as a government or educational institution or company) that controlled the contents of the site.

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So that excludes the ODP, since it is not controlled by such an authority. Of course we have Guidelines. But that is not the same thing.

Naturally Google will not reveal the list of 178 seed sites. In fact they won't even say whether they are using TrustRank. So that has left the way open for speculation. But no convincing evidence has been put forward that the ODP is one of a set of "trusted seed sites" used by Google in its algorithm.

I would be interested to know how you became so prominent in aworld-institution from an UK base. A great achievement. I have been trying to register as a potential editor but your return email is full for 3 hours and aol is just sending rejects.

James - The ODP servers are in California, but the Open Directory has editors from all over the world and lists sites in many languages.

If you are asking how I personally became prominent, I wouldn't call myself that. However we do have a Briton or two in the upper echelons of the Open Directory.

I have been trying to register as a potential editor but your return email is full for 3 hours and aol is just sending rejects.

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James, do you mean that you can't send in the editor application form? There have been some technical problems recently with the applications -- please see the thread at the top of this forum titled "Recurring problems with applications".

lol Nea. That is a painful link thread to read. It reads something like the skit 'who's on first.'

Well I've got my site to top 30 in an incredibly competitive business category without being listed in the ODP. This is out of 8 million returns. It took about 2 weeks of playing from a revised site. I'm very happy with it - I would still like to be #1 though. Perhaps at the end of the month when Google re-indexes my PageRank will increase and it will push me up to top 10. This will indicate to me that it is VERY possible to get there without ODP reliance (I don't doubt there is that possibility, it just may make things more difficult.)

I will not say that it is easy to get to this place - it's involved alot of studying, website reorganization, and some tricky coding amongst other things. My site is mostly a gallery of images and a particular design (which I don't want to sacrifice as an artist/designer) which makes 'page relevancy' even more difficult considering there's little text to spider. It has taken me about 1.5 month's worth of work. In monitoring this - I haven't been able to crack the top 30 - it's just been hovering there for about a week.

In a reverse look-up of the top 30 results, almost all of them have been listed in the ODP. I've run an Alexa reverse traffic report on these sites and quickly saw how much an ODP listing propogates to other directories and search engine results - all of which have a decently high Page-Rank which gets passed on. The leads are quite remarkable and unmistakable. The problem is that these other sites will not let you independently submit since they are tied-in with the ODP.

Again, a listing here brings up 'the chicken or the egg came first' scenario. But undoubtedly, a listing does propogate very well adding to PageRank/TrustRank. Nevertheless, I am working hard to 'beat the system' one way or another.

Sorry to appear 'greedy.' I hate working for money, but as an artist I know all-too-well what starving for 8 years can do to you. It pretty much sucks. Having to do sales and beg is even worse. Whether or not a top 10 gets you any business - that's beyond my understanding and a best-guess at most.

In a reverse look-up of the top 30 results, almost all of them have been listed in the ODP.

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Probably a false interpretion of reality. What many fail to realize is that editors often do Google searchs and find the top listing sites and then list them in ODP if appropriate. So it should not be assumed that the listing in ODP made them in the top of Google search, it's just as likely that being on top in Google search got them into ODP.

I have a group of categories where hundreds of sites were added by me doing gGoogle searches. That represents about 95% of the category, only about 5% were ever submitted.

bobrat said:

I have a group of categories where hundreds of sites were added by me doing gGoogle searches. That represents about 95% of the category, only about 5% were ever submitted.

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And many other editors do the same as you do.

Expertu said:

And many other editors do the same as you do.

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For me it all depends on the kind of category. For some categories I only look at the suggestions as I know it to be the best source for new sites for that category. For other categories I regulary visit some specialised linklists and see what they have listed as new. For some other categories I just read the local newspaper and see which companies are advertising and have metioned their url. And for some I might do a search in G / Y / M.

ODP Is The Best For Search Engine Placements & Rankings!!!

I Love impact of ODP on search engines.

100% Sure that ODP can give you the boost in your google page ranks and search engine keyword placements.

Search engine placements are driven 99% forcefully with the title tag that is used in the ODP for that site...

At last i wanna say the ODP is the best...

I sometimes do a "search keyword site:.edu OR .gov" search too

anandmaheshwari - you may feel sure, but where is your evidence?

The Open Directory title for a listing is anchor text (the text used in a link). Google certainly gives weight to anchor text. That is well-known and can be proven. But it does not give any more weight to anchor text from the Open Directory than from any other site.

Naturally the existence of ODP clones means that ODP anchor text will be multiplied. The effect of that is uncertain. There has been a suspicion for some time that heavy use of the exact same anchor text will be ignored by Google. However only Google employees know for sure. For all we know Google is capable of filtering out ODP clones and Wikipedia clones from its calculations of anchor text value.

Google announced recently that it is using 200 factors in ranking sites. Previously it used to say 100, so clearly its algorithm is getting more complex all the time. There is no simple answer that will consistently deliver top ranking.

jeanmanco said:

... Google certainly gives weight to anchor text. That is well-known and can be proven. But it does not give any more weight to anchor text from the Open Directory than from any other site ... Google announced recently that it is using 200 factors in ranking sites. Previously it used to say 100, so clearly its algorithm is getting more complex all the time. There is no simple answer that will consistently deliver top ranking.

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This is an awesome discussion, and this particular section catches my eye, because right here is where a lot of the confusion takes place, even for "seasoned" folk .... PR and SERP and completely separate factors. Granted, there is undoubtedly some overlapping factors between the two, but the factors for better SERP and PR and otherwise separate issues. Just my .02 ...

What many fail to realize is that editors often do Google searchs and find the top listing sites and then list them in ODP if appropriate.

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Definitely. You all helped make me aware of this in the other 'letter' thread. Up to 28 today btw - it keeps bouncing.

Update. My site is hovering around #19 in Google with less than 2 months worth of work (which was a tremendous amount of work I may add.) It's off the searchable radar for the other search engines. But as a matter of opinion, that doesn't really matter as much to me. Earlier today I saw it hit #9 but it quickly fluttered away.

I don't know how much higher I could get without a Yahoo Directory and/or ODP listing - and even then I'm not sure what kinda of impact a listing on those two would have. Sans textual site content, I don't know what else I could possibly do to give an art/rendering gallery some juice.

I keep trying and trying and trying... Can I get listed based on persistence?

>I keep trying and trying and trying... Can I get listed based on persistence?

No. Persistence is highly counterproductive. You can get permanently non-listed based solely on persistence. Do what you can to make life peaceful and productive for the volunteers.

I don't know what else I could possibly do to give an art/rendering gallery some juice.

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I have a genealogy website that is not listed in DMOZ, yet is #1 in Google for one of the two most important search terms.

An art rendering site is positivey exciting in comparison to a genealogy site -- yet by added such things as a discussion forum (primarily to provide information, rather than to foster discussion), a photo gallery, some "light" perspectives on the family histories, etc. the ranking was achieved -- and achieved fairly quickly.

I cannot (and would not) try and tell you what type fo content to add, but I would suggest that there is definitely content you could add -- you often just have to color outside of the lines.

Remember, neither you nor we can predict when the category will be worked. If you can't predict, you can't control even if you COULD manipulate--you don't know what effect your manipulation would have. And you can't really manipulate either.

This is a good thing, a good thing for you, really. Because if manipulators could control what happened, the affiliate-doorway-marketroid "webmaster" spammers would have long ago learned the secret; there are enough of them to keep the ODP editors trapped looking at spam FOREVER -- your site's chances would be ZERO for the next twenty-five years at least (the spammers would be that far ahead of you already). As it is, the site has a .001 or better chance of a review every day.

Personally I think that the Google/ODP myth is spread by so-called SEO'ers who charge their clients money for promotion and fail to achieve results. They then excuse their failure by stating that its because either the ODP wouldn't list the site or that the ODP had removed the keywords from the description. They then point to various forums full of posts by other SEO 'professionals' saying the same thing.

This latter happened to our firms site (which is nothing to do with me – I'm a firmware engineer). So I modified one page of my international folk dance site to promote one of the firm's key words and, lo and behold, I was UK #2 on Google for that product in two days . The firm then started listening to me and carried out my recommended changes (basically remove all the SEO rubbish) and within a few weeks we were up at #1 or #2 for most of our keywords.

See who benefits from the myth and factor that in.

regards