Whether you call it DMOZ, ODP or the Sandbox Buster you should be familiar with it.  Dmoz.org is a powerful and easy tool if you understand it.  DMOZ has been around a long time and people have been complaining it for almost as long. 

It has over 74,000 volunteer human editors that manually review each submission.  Most of these editors are people that are honest.  Some are not.  Some editors because of their personal bias will delete sites and manipulate anchor text and descriptions.  Before you start complaining let’s get real.  Out of 74,000 humans there has to be some bad ones. DMOZ does police itself but because of the great power it carries with its links, Google trustrank and oh yea its FREE it attracts a number of people to try and abuse it. 

If you feel that your site has unjustly not been listed in DMOZ, make sure of a few things.

Did you wait long enough from when you submitted it?  DMOZ has a backlog of over 2 million submissions.  Your submission is probably going to take weeks or months.

Did you follow the DMOZ guidelines?  DMOZ does not allow keyword stuffing.  If you substitute your company name for your keyword, you were probably deleted for that violation.  If your description was longer than 2 sentences and full of CAPITALIZED keywords, it also was probably disregarded.

Does your site has real content?  Would Matt Cutts of Google Quality Control think you have real content?  DMOZ is looking to create a directory of websites not 1 page business card sites. 

If you CAREFULLY read the DMOZ guidelines and followed it and waited and are still not listed, then try to contact the editor for that category.  After waiting a few weeks (don’t forget the 2 million submission backlog) then ask the DMOZ editor for the larger category that your sub-category is a part of.

Next Thursday I will be talking with Michael Gray aka graywolf.  He thinks the show is about his new job as the elementary school website coordinator but I secretly sneaked into the wolf’s den and I spiked his drink with a powerful drug to get him to spill his Internet secrets.   

The concept of six degrees of separation is a commonly understood one.  Pretty much everyone can be connected to anyone through six or less people.  I have a friend in LA, that friend has a friend who is a writer in Hollywood, that write knows an agent, that agent knows Jessica Alba.  So theoretically I could start dating Jessica Alba next week .  Enough about Jessica Alba and moving onto more important things like how does this concept make us money. Read the rest of this entry »

Scraper sites, feed stealers and any other content theivery is not good when you are the victim.  They can create big problems that will hurt your website and possibly lower your traffic.  But they also create a silver lining for all of the havoc they bring.  Be smart and enjoy the silver lining and minimize the havoc.

Read the rest of this entry »

Google Adwords is going to be on GoodKarma this week.  We’ll be talking about the new developments, old rumblings and current myths.  If you have a question that you would like addressed during the show feel free to send it to me or post it here in the comments.

 Have an excellent week!

Shoes are a necessary part of life.  Shoes keep the broken crack pipes of the NYC sidewalk out of my feet.  But how many shoes are really necessary?  My lovely wife has lot of shoes.  I lost count after the 60th pair. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday my computer’s cooling fan started making a funny noise.  So I cleared everything out from under my desk to take a look at it.  The bad news is that it looks like I will need to replace the cooling fan or maybe just buy a new faster computer .  The really bad news is that I found 4 affiliate checks from seven months ago that had fallen behind my desk. 

I hate losing money UGGGHHHH!  Read the rest of this entry »

In order to rank you need websites to link to you.  It doesn’t matter how great your content is.  If no one links to you your great content will never get exposed.  How do you find websites to link to you?  Simple - just reverse engineer the backlinks of your competition. 

To reverse engineer the backlinks just do a backlink search for the top 10 ranking sites using Yahoo Site Explorer http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/.   Yahoo gives more information than a Google backlink search.  Make sure when you use Y! Site Explorer to use the drop downs to select show inlinks “except from this domain”.  This will remove your competition pages from the results.  Which is good since I doubt your competition is willing to link to you. Read the rest of this entry »

INCUMBENCY

The sites that currently are in the top rankings have the benefit of being the incumbents and it is a huge benefit.  These incumbent sites gain hundreds of free links from scrapers. 

Scrapers sites put up massive amounts of auto-generated content and wrap adsense around it.  Where do these scraper sites get this content?  They simply republish the serps for thousands of keywords.  Thus the link and snippet for the top ranking sites gets republished on hundreds if not thousands of scraper sites.  Read the rest of this entry »

So last night I started thinking about some weird going ons at Google.  These are not widespread but they also do not appear to be rare occurrences.  First the site: searches at Google (which are supposed to only return pages from one domain) returns pages from multiple domains.

Then I notice Adsense site diagnostic report (screen capture below) is telling me that my site is not letting it crawl some pages.  Upon a closer look I notice that Adsense thinks msncache.com is part of my site.  (Sidenote msn.com robots.txt allows it to be crawled it.  Adsense crawls the msn serps to discover as many pages of your site so it can better classify it and show relevant ads.)

Don’t panic just yet.  This is not a return of the 302 hijacking issue.  This is something different.  It does not appear to be hijacking more like a simple reporting bug.   I am still trying to figure out how this reporting bug could occur.  Hopefully this is not a bigger issue of Google not being able to tell proper ownership of sites.