Back in the early days of the Web, you used to have to ‘submit’ your website to the search engines. I remember that, back in 2001, you could pay Yahoo US $300 to fast track this process. This submission process was partially due to the directory model that early search engines such as Yahoo used. Site owners helped populate the search databases by identifying where their site fit in the directory taxonomy.
It sounds a little goofy in retrospect, doesn’t it?
A client recently asked me about the relevance of venerable directories like Yahoo and DMOZ. I told them not to worry about these directories, but wanted to back myself up with a little data.
I went and checked out the web stats for a website that’s been around in both directories for at least four years. The site had about 95,000 referrals in the first 8 months of 2006. 27 came from Yahoo’s directory and 6 came from DMOZ.
Technically speaking, if it doesn’t take you very long to submit to Yahoo, then I suppose your 15 minutes of time may be worth 27 visitors. I know other sites use DMOZ, but I don’t know of any popular ones.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
And yet, in the article previous to this one, you bemoan the state of gaming computer-generated indices. And by indices, I mean aggregators, but still. I agree that directories don’t matter *now*, but I’m interested in whether they *should* matter. Put another way, is there not value in having subject-area experts–or to use a word that has a little less baggage these days, enthusiasts–create a place where they link to what they think is good. I don’t mean necessarily good and *new*, since bloggers are good for that, but just good?
I think my opinions can exist independently of one another. That is:
* Automated systems are easy to game.
* Directories are irrelevent to today’s web.
I agree, though, that it would be nice if somebody won the ‘human-filtered information’ war. Wikipedia, Squidoo and Topix.net (though they’re more timely, I think) spring first to mind, and there are dozens of others.
One of the problems with old-school directories was that they didn’t evaluate sites very well. For example, the Yahoo Directory lists ten sites about coaching ice hockey, but which one is most useful?
It’s been gospel in search engine optimization circles that inclusion in DMOZ can give a boost to your website in search results. I don’t know how true that is, but I’ve heard it around quite a bit.
I submit to DMOZ because I believe it influences PageRank.
I’m a DMOZ editor. I believe it has become irrelevant and useless. Large chunks of it are abandoned. Sorry, that is just the way it is. Google brings several thousand more people to my site than DMOZ does. And as far as PR, well, my DMOZ listed site is lower than the one I didn’t list. Maybe it has some effect, but I can’t discern it.
the directories current main function is more for pagerank factors for the search engines rather than direct visitors to your site.
The higher you rank more possible visitors will come to your site. I wouldn’t expect to find them very often in your logs. I wouldn’t write them off yet until you start reading that google etc does.
Pete: To be clear, you’re sounding pretty factual, when, in fact, this is apparently signficantly disputed (not only here, but, say, in this list–look for “Implicit Trust of Site” as well).
I still submit new sites to DMOZ because I find there are other sites that scrape that content (mostly other specialized directories). If you have some control over the DMOZ listing, however rarely visited by humans, then its percolates around. But I haven’t done much new-site submission for a couple of years, so it could be just a habit now, like submitting sites to Yahoo! and pinging Google’s new site page.
What, you didn’t know about Google’s new site page? Well, you do now.
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