Search Engine Land announced that DMOZ will be shutting down as of March 14, 2017. DMOZ, or Open Directory Project was once a great backlink to have, and fairly straightforward to obtain many years ago, at least in some categories.
DMOZ was a human-edited directory, and at as large a scale as DMOZ enjoyed, that factor introduced the temptation for corruption. I’ve personally been promoting websites in the legal vertical for over 10 years, and have submitted dozens of sites to DMOZ in the attorney category, painstakingly following their guidelines, and have not had one listing published in all that time. On the other hand, if you look at the clients of one very large and influential attorney marketing firm, you’ll see their clients’ listings appearing consistently. Maybe the editor of the legal category requires a bribe, maybe he/she works for the influential marketing firm or has a lucrative deal with them? All speculation, but all possibilities. I’m not alone in thinking along those lines:
I’ve often heard the argument that “it’s not such a valuable link any more, don’t sweat it,” however my little friend Open Site Explorer would tend to disagree:
Not many backlinks with that kind of PA and DA available on the Internet.
With DMOZ shutting down, we’ll have a chance to see how really valuable or worthless that link had been. We’ll also have to keep an eye on how quickly Google deindexes the DMOZ listings. Their residual effect could hang on for some time in the bowels of Google’s index.