No short cut to Dmoz Heaven, Patience and determination Pays.

Dmoz the Mother of all directories is the only directory in the whole internet that is regarded as a favorite by all top Search Engines. For Google sites in Dmoz get a small level of positive score since all the sites accepted in Dmoz are hand picked and reviewed under strict conditions by Dmoz editors.

I have seen this when Dmoz had a official forum named Resource-zone people used to whine and complain that their submission is not accepted. Also people just bash Dmoz in various forums and message boards for giving credit to some sites and accused of Dmoz editors of even taking bribes to get listed sites listed in corresponding category.

From my past experience with getting sites listed in Dmoz I tell you there is no short cut to a listing in Dmoz, also dmoz is the most genuine directory out there and the corruption rate from my analysis and experience is some where around 0.0001%. That is equal to one out of 10,000 Dmoz editors are corrupted. If you see as per the Dmoz blog at any given time there are around 7000 active Dmoz editors. With a corruption rate of 1 out of 10,000 editors I am sure there are no corrupt or cheating editors for dmoz. If you think Dmoz has not accepted your submission stop whining about it and see what are the areas you have problems with your website. Remember today you come to internet and tomorrow you want your site getting listed is not with Dmoz there are more than 1000 cheap zero value directories out there who will list you for nothing ( fact they are good for nothing directories ) . Dmoz likes good quality sites to be listed no Dmoz editor is against listing any site as long it satisfies their quality guidelines.

Dmoz remains to be most comprehensive directory on the web only directory that is anywhere near to it is the Yahoo directory. But still yahoo directory is not the best directory you can come across since its paid. You pay 299$ for review of your site and most of the sites pass through this review but with Dmoz this is not the case you can never buy a listing in Dmoz.

Dmoz is not run for listing all commercial websites. Dmoz is here to provide best value to its visitors. Dmoz editors don’t just rely on site submission for entry into Dmoz. Most of the editors are Web Savvy and they score the Internet in search of quality websites and quality articles to list them in their category. In fact some of my previous discussions with some Meta Editors revealed there will be atleast 30% of articles / news / websites / other stuff listed in Dmoz are through Scanning the internet.

So let me get you a checklist on what it takes to get into Dmoz.

1. First and the most important point is Dmoz Quality guidelines make sure your site doesn’t violate it. If it does there is no point in even submitting the site to dmoz since it will never be accepted. Some of the guidelines. Duplicate sites – Sites that has mirrors or duplicates and has an exact copy currently running your site cannot get into Dmoz
   Affiliate sites – A site fill with affiliate links and affiliate information will not be accepted into Dmoz. There is no exception for this make sure your site is not a MFA ( Made For Adsense ) or affiliate site.
   Status of Website: Make sure your site is current and that its fully completed an incomplete site when reviewed by a editor will mostly be rejected or will be put in backlog. Its very important that you impress the editor by the first look if the site has pages which says under construction or broken links or incomplete information I am sure your site will never be listed.
   Multi level marketing related websites, Affiliate reseller sites, sites that use cloaking, sites that promote illegal stuff like child pornography, Bootlegs, Warez, pirated software etc are not included in Dmoz
2. Contact Information: Most of the editors see this as a important factor for site credibility most of the time a site without proper verifiable contact information is rejected. Make sure you have the current contact information and that its legitimately visible on the page. It can either be on a contact page or other pages you prefer make sure it is easily accessible when a editor reviews your site.
3. Value for users: See how much value your site will provide for users Dmoz as I said is here to provide best value for users they are not here to list your site which has 50,000 products selling actively online. Say the same site has community areas like forums, reviews etc then your site has more chance of getting listed in Dmoz.
4. Find the right category: This is a very important factor most of time a listing is delayed or rejected if its submitted to the wrong category. Remember Dmoz editors are not paid almost all of them except a top few are all doing work as a volunteer service so make sure you don’t trouble them too much. Take time to research be best category. Say suppose you are a Car Dealer in California. Go to Dmoz and type in Car dealer California http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=car+dealers+california , you will see a lot of sites showing up which are related to the query you submitted. Now just take time and go through some of the categories which showed up for the Search. This particular search is complicated since the categories that came of are too vague. Here are some of the topics that came up.
   Regional: North America: United States: California: Regions: Northern California: Business and Economy Regional: North America: United States: California: Counties: San Joaquin: Business and Economy
   Business: Automotive: Recreational Vehicles: Retailers: North America: United States: California

   Above I picked some categories which showed up which looked relevant. Now by look we can eliminate California/counties/san Joaquin since is more specific to a city and you are selling whole of California. Next I can also eliminate Northern California since again you are selling whole of California. So mostly the ideal topic is Retailers/North America/United states/ California. So are you convinced that you can submit here. STOP: Don’t do it yet since there might be other categories which never showed up search which can be relevant to your website. So I recommend now going through the regular way, Just click the categories and browse and see if you can find any other category that is relevant to your site if you are convinced that there cannot be any more category relevant to your website then proceed to submission.

5. Submission Guidelines: Make sure you have a well written title tag and a good descriptive description tag. Always avoid the idea of a optimized title tag. There is nothing like that for Dmoz. Most of the time best title will be your company name itself. For example if your company is California Auto Dealers Inc then that will be the best title for your website. When it comes to writing description make sure you don’t read it like a advertisement, don’t stuff your keywords in it don’t repeat your title, prices etc. Best description will be something which doesn’t fall into any of the categories that is pointed out here in Dmoz submission guidelines. http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/describing.html
6. Multiple listings: Sometimes Multiple listings are allowed for example you can submit your site if you eligible for the main category as well as your regional sub category. This is rare research before you do this.
7. Patience: After you submit your site please wait. Wait for atleast a year before any sort of panic there could be 1000 behind the scene reasons for your site not listed. If your site is not listed find out whether you have anything that violate Dmoz guidelines if you find anything just fix it and keep waiting. Don’t go an resubmit all resubmissions will make your existing submission being pushed to the bottom of the website backlog. If the category you submitted has 100s of websites waiting then your wait time will be longer best option is to be patient and wait.
8. Finally stop talking bad about Dmoz or bashing them in forums this is one of the most important thing they see. Dmoz editors are some of the most active members of internet and they will find you regardless of which forum or message board you are bashing them. Stop false accusations against Dmoz they are the best out there. Just for the sake of backlinks don’t ever try anything like shoemoney did here (shoemoney.com/2007/08/26/dmoz-extortion/ ) . Your site will never get into Dmoz for atleast the next 100 years.
9. P.S: See if your site really qualifies to be listed in Dmoz. If your site is listed in Dmoz does it add atleast a small value to dmoz. I will personally see that before submitting to Dmoz if you are new to internet and just build a site take time for the site to grow make it best for your users work atleast 6 months on the site. Once you feel you are good enough submit to Dmoz this increases the chance of acceptance into Dmoz more easily.

   Lets all make Dmoz a better place to be.
   Some Good resources : http://blog.dmoz.org
   http://www.resource-zone.com/forum/

   Search Engine Genie.

Catching a bee in a forest full of bees – Unpredictable Search engines.

1. Blog Spamming: Spamming blog with comment spam most targeted sites were big University sites like Stanford.edu where they allowed people to post comment for their articles or news section
2. Aggressive / Automated Link exchanges: Aggressive Link exchanges were still working but not to the level it used to work around 2002 or 2003. Automated link exchanges became a huge industry and people were using very aggressive link exchanges to gain a upper hand in backlinks
3. Forum spamming: Spamming forums through signature links , links in their posts, links through automated forum spam etc. This was a very popular tactics where people just visit forums to have their links in signature or in their post to gain search engine benefit.
4. Cross-linking: A major search engine spam where a spammer starts 100s of sites and cross link them to get link benefit in search engines.
5. Dmoz clones: Huge number of dmoz clones started arising and became people since it can generate 100s of 1000s of pages instantly for search engines.
6. Directory spam huge number directories started coming out with zero value to visitors built just for search engine benefit
7. Links from lots of blogs. This was something which came into existing in 2004 but still in existence to a certain extent.
8. Links and contents hidden on page, behind images, in noscript tag, in hidden contents etc.
9. Spamming wikipedia by inserting links ( Nofollow was introduced mostly for wikipedia ) .
10. Text link ads: Buying your way to the top of search engine organic rankings. Buying text links and gaining search engine benefit due to the search engines dependency on backlinks and anchor text power to rank a website.

If I list it out I can keep on listing lots of things people used for spamming the search engines. But if you today most of the above tactics dont work anymore with search engines. Search engine like Google has closed its algorithm for these sort of loop holes. I can tell you with some sort of background with search algorithms. Just to close the above 8 tactics they need to implement 30 different factors. Its not that easy to detect a spam without hurting millions of websites out there who might have something similar to it but is not considered spam.

To combat these problems search engines role our algorithmic changes very carefully after a lot of testing so that it doesn’t affect any search rankings of innocent webmasters who never did anything against search engine guidelines. At this point I can imagine atleast 150 factors playing into ranking competitive keywords in Google.

Lets see what’s the 2007/2008 search engine spam tactic

Social bookmarking which has picked up so much these days has been a target of search engine spamming for sometime now. People want to bookmark only interesting pages but now everyone bookmarks everything. This is done mostly for search engine benefit. Search engines love sites like delicious or Digg and they tend to crawl links from these sites better. So people tend to target these sites.

Search Engine Spamming in the name of link baiting, Link baiting a very commonly used word these days has been a subject of abuse. People imagining to be creative use some really aggressive methods on their sites to gain natural backlinks. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t . Bad PR ( public relations ) is a main problem here. People tend to write crap about others or about other sites so that they can gain the sympathy of the other party. This is definitely not the healthy way for gaining back links.

Pay per post , pay for blogging – an other tactic which was subject to spamming . Now people are buying posts in blogs. They make good bloggers write about their site and provide a back link to them. Most of the time this is just like a paid text link advertisement.

Adding a page on a established site about your site with anchor text backlinks

Reviews on established blogs are similar to Pay per post where you pay a blogger to review your site and link back in return for Money.

1$ articles – This is a very difficult to combat spam where advertisers are paying 1$ for articles which are of very low quality and stuff their site with junk information to show search engines that they have contents.

This is just a small list of new ideas to spam search engines. I can go on to list more so we cannot blame the search engines in anyway for doing something like this.

One wonderful thing is the death of Anchor Text link advertising in 2007/2008. I am personally Happy about it. It makes the rich and famous dominate Search Results. Its not anymore the case. Search Engines dont see text link advertising as a search engine friendly one and are ready to impose strong penalties for sites that buy or sell links. Though Search engines like Google like to fight search engine spamming algorithmically I am sure some manual review especially on paid links or renting links will bring more success and quality to the index.

Considering all these new tactics coming up I am sure in future Search Engine Optimization is going to be one of the hardest industry to work on. Saying that if there are no innovating ideas to get a site ranked I am sure search engine quality engineers will go Jobless. So let us keep them working harder to fight search engine spamming algorithmically.

Search Engine Genie.

Are you in wikipedia’s spam blacklist,

Do you have your site in wikipedia’s blacklist then I recommend get it removed immediately. Personally we don’t know any of our sites or client sites in wikipedia blacklist.
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Spam_blacklist

Wikipedia has a strong relationship with Search engines, Wikipedia does share this information to Search engines and it will result in your site loosing credibility with search engines.

Mattcutts of Google denies any automated penalty

“
If you do a search for [wikipedia spam blacklist], the first result is helpful. It gives pointers to various strings and urls that Wikipedia has blacklisted on their site.
I’d characterize that list as much like a spam report: the data can be useful, but at least in Google it wouldn’t automatically result in a penalty (for the reason that site A might be trying to hurt site B).
That could be one of the things jehochman was referring to.”

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wikipedia-spam-resulting-in-google-yahoo-penalties/5854/

Even if matt denies he does say its kind of like a spam report so I recommend staying out of the list always,

Search Engines love webmasters and siteowners

I am seriously surprised how the trend has changed from completely ignoring what people shout about their sites to a full customer care by all the search engines. I belong to one of the old member group of webmasterworld and before about 3 years search engines rarely care about a webmaster or site owner’s cries. People used to shout, cry and express their pain in forums like webmasterworld and i help you but no search engine employee gave their ears on looking into their problems.

But now its a total different world I would say. Looking at the prompt responses people get from search quality engineers about their site problems it makes me seriously amazed.

For Google we have mattcutts blog, webmaster central blog, adwords rep in webmasterworld forum , John Muller participating in forums, Mattcutts goes around in webmaster / SEO blogs and responds to any specific problems or concerns ( ofcourse his blog is great ) , we have Google Groups where many employees like John Muller, Jonathan simon, Adam Lasnik, Susan, Mariya etc hangout, Most of the google experts are always around when a webmaster is serious about their problems,

Back in 2003 we just had one ghost like representative from Google named GoogleGuy in webmasterworld who comes around and asks for feedback. If there is some update to their algorithm or search index occasionally he will respond with a lot of ambiguity. His answers are like answers from the Google god itself and his posts are followed so much. People just come to webmaster world to search for his posts. Till today 95% or more webmasterworld active members don’t know who the real person with the nickname Googleguy is. Many suspect Googleguy is Mattcutts but he denied to be the original Googleguy. But today things have changed we now have Google employees answering questions all over the place. They recently hosted a webmaster live chat session first of its kind which was a success attended by more than 250 people.

For yahoo it used to be Tim Mayer nick named Yahoo Tim he just comes around and gives a weather update ( Yahoo’s index update ) or answers some rare questions but now they have a wonderful place for webmasters to seek help.

http://suggestions.yahoo.com/?prop=SiteExplorer

This place gives much better support than what Google does. I rarely see a question that is not reviewed by a yahoo site explorer employee. That is a very positive sign and a huge step forward in bringing webmasters/White hat SEOs and site owners closer. Its great that Yahoo a search engine which used to be very reluctant to help webmasters now have a place where they provide instant solution for Site owner’s problems.

MSN it used to be MSN dude he started from the day MSN separated from Yahoo to become an independent Search Engine. He comes for some feedback but never used to be regular but now even the big Microsoft has a forum for webmasters to talk about problem with their sites. When I visited this forum I can see people like Brett Hunt a Live search employee actively answering questions of site owners. This is great.

So seeing the world change so much I can just say one thing finally search engines have understood the importance of Good relationship and communication with webmasters and site owners to maintain the quality of the index. A Good communication and setting up strong guidelines help webmasters go in the right direction when it comes to ranking their sites in Search Engines.

I like to thank wholeheartedly all top Search engine Engineers for taking this bold step of helping us webmasters.

Search Engine Genie

Acceptable downtime for Search Engines

Downtime of website, Hmm everyone should have gone through this if you are running a website. Lots of people are worried if the site goes down then they will loose their search engine traffic and loose their rankings altogether. This is not totally true search engines don’t penalize or just drop a site just because a site is down for couple of days. Even if a site is down for couple of days and during that time Search Engine Robots visit’s the site its not a problem they will come again they are programmed to do that. Me having written my own search engine robot program have done that way.

But that being said if your site is down for a long time then you have reasons to worry. Search engines if they repeatedly hit a site and see that its down they will remove the site from the index or prevent the site from ranking all together. They do this to prevent users from visiting a site from their SERPs ( Search Engine Results Pages ) and returning empty handed . So I recommend if your site is down don’t wait too long just make sure the host solves the problem promptly or switch host and change DNS immediately.

This will save a lot of headache with search engines.

New SEO comics Section in Search Engine Genie Live now,

We have always wanted to bring a comic section in Search Engine Genie, After a long wait we were able to bring in a comic section in our website. Our designers have done a wonderful job of bringing in some great comical work on today’s happening in Search Engines. Lots of comic images will be posted in this page very soon. Our SEO comics page will be one of its kind and the only colored comic pages for the SEO industry.

We are right now in process of adding upto 40 images. After we complete with that we will be updating a new image every week to make sure we keep the page upto date on latest happenings.

All images are watermarked and proprietary to Search Engine Genie, Feel free to vist the comic page often and enjoy our sense of humour on the Search engine industry we love,

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-comics.htm

Search Engine Genie Blog Team,

Google NO competition with SEOs – search engine marketing company performics to be sold

Performics a search engine marketing company which was part of Doubleclick acquistion by google will be sold. This is great news since many were afraid google will come into search engine marketing industry which will be virtually killing the organic rankings since they know their algorithm on how to rank and if they sell search marketing they are virtually manipulating the search results.

Its great news that google is selling performics and not entering the organic search engine optimization industry. Hats off to Google for doing this http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/selling-performics-search-marketing.html

According to official google blog

“We believe this will allow us to maintain objectivity and the search marketing business to continue to grow and innovate and serve its customers. While we have not yet identified a buyer, we’ve received preliminary interest from a number of our current partners. Search Marketing will continue to run as a separate entity until the division is sold.”

SEO Blog team,

What is the maximum length of anchor text suitable for search engines?

Anchor text plays a very important role in search engine rankings. Search engines give a lot of weight for keywords in anchor text. Due to this I have heard search engine spammers using 15 or 20 words in anchor text to give weight to all the keywords.

SO what is the good number. Answer is simple do what is best for users do you think your users will like to have 20 keywords in anchor text when linking to a page, I am sure no so please use what is better for your users. Maximum I recommend is to have not more than 6 words in anchor text when you are linking to an external page or a page within your website. Good anchor text links adds value to both users as well as search engines.

The whole concept of Googlebombing was based on this, People used to just add keywords which you want to attack some and just link to that page. We used to have the most infamous anchor text bombs like ” miserable failure ” which used to link george bush page, French military victories page which used to link to a page which talked about french military loses.

More on Google bombing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb

Maximum page limits Search Engine crawlers can crawl

One of the most asked question in forums and in message boards what is the maximum depth a search engine can crawl for a page. What is the maximum size Of html /pdf that can indexed by top search engines.

1. For google: As per our latest research Google has a maximum crawl and cache depth of 1 MB only ( excluding images / graphics ) . It Used to be 100 kb then they increased to 250 kb then to 500kb and the latest update is 1 MB per file.

2. Yahoo overtakes Google by a long way, Their indexing and caching limit is 5 MB, check the screen shots below,

3. MSN Search engine: Its very unpredictable for MSN but from our experiment MSN can cache upto 3 MB, we never tested about that probably someone in their search quality team can answer that.

I dont think we worry about any more search engines. I am sure at some point this data is useful for anyone out there. I know we do have some PDFs and large doc to be indexed. Its very important we know the cache limit for that,

SEO Blog Team,

Misspellings and SEO – Is it Good for Search Engines.

Some people have questions whether misspellings of words you target of your company name or any products or services you sell really helps. I would say misspellings are a natural part of the web, but there is a limit for it.

Misspelling SEO has been part of strategy for many Search Engine Spammers for a very long time. Because of this search engines see misspelling on pages especially done on a high level as a major Search engine spam. If you want to misspell your company name for 4 or 5 words then you are perfectly fine with it. But if you are looking to spam then you are not going to win against search engines.

Don’t misspell your competitor names on your pages there were spammers who used to do it and you might be sued by big corporations if you are misspelling their names.

Google says

“Keyword stuffing

“Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.

To fix this problem, review your site for misused keywords. Typically, these will be lists or paragraphs of keywords, often randomly repeated. Check carefully, because keywords can often be in the form of hidden text, or they can be hidden in title tags or alt attributes.

“