Should DMOZ switch to nofollow?

It's my feeling that if the ODP wants to progress honestly and without fear of corruption or malfeasance, they should simply add "nofollow" tags to their outbound links. This would let the world know that DMOZ is not about boosting link popularity, but rather about providing a good, human-edited directory for human users.

If we go back to a time when DMOZ's only purpose was to refer traffic directly, the directory would be in a much better position, and we wouldn't need an Open Directory forum...

Thoughts, opinions?

I was always under the impression that merely the fact you were listed in DMOZ gave you extra creedance with Google. As the Google directory takes a direct feed from DMOZ the "nofollow" tags would serve little purpose from this perspective. I guess it makes sense that Google would wish to give extra value to sites listed in DMOZ as it's a human edited category and most of the sites listed are of a good quality, thus helping reduce the appearance of spam sites in Google. However as we all know actually getting listed in DMOZ can take an eternity and little appears to done to improve the situation.

Only if the 'clones' (including G.dir) adopt the nofollow, will that work - so I fear.

According to Google and Yahoo! reps I spoke to at SES Toronto and NYC, they both ignore all the DMOZ clone links - they are in the link command but won't add any link popularity. I think that may be an overstatement, but if DMOZ is issuing the data, they can add "nofollow" to anyone who uses it and webmasters would have to manually remove the tags.

I wouldn't rank that high if it weren't for my cherished dmoz clones. I think they were talking "sloblock", or were "wishful thinking aloud".

I agree that a dmoz (clone) link is not what it used to be... I'm glad I picked up more links on the way since last september - LOL

I am goint to answer rather than just ignore this post.
I have no opinion.
If they do they do,, if they dont they dont.
If they did people would submit a lot less sites and the editors would have to go and find them to add.
It would probably go back to the way it was before pagerank.
In the whole scale of things it really wouldnt make a great deal of difference to anyone as it is now just something that we all want to be in for the pr boost.


*This dosent mean to sound like i am being flippant but i was typing as i was thinking and giving my true opinion*

dmoz editors (here) claim they find the most/best/whatever sites themselves anyway. Other than the site I suggested recently (grin) they can't/shouldn't be ar*ed to bother with submissions anyway. I estimate that 90% of submissions NEVER get listed, if only because the cat is too popular (hence: full) anyway.

It would not bother me if dmoz was not a factor in my PR or my linkpop. I don't think that a couple of links matter that much in the scheme of a large website. Nobody outside of google should know if TrustRank is or isn't a factor in the algo but it's possible that a DMOZ listing could give you some sort of a boost in that regard.

Bottom line, it makes no difference to me. I would still want to be listed there and would be willing to pay a small fee to have my sites considered. That would help with their backlog situation and maybe with that fee they could have some clerical effort to get sites processed in a reasonable length of time and let you know if you didn't get in and why.

The purpose of the nofollow attribute is to remove links created by users with out editorial control. This is not the case with DMOZ. It would make sense to add the no follow on wikipedia, but they have already tried that.

For DMOZ, though, the purpose would be to go back to being a fair and "open" directory. No webmasters or site owners would have any ulterior motives, editors wouldn't be there for the wrong reasons, etc.

It's basically abuse of nofollow, but it's high-minded, altruistic abuse, and even we can get behind altruistic abuse, right gang?

So do you not buy into the theory that a DMOZ or ultimately a Google Directory listing is part of the Google algo, albeit maybe a small part? As I said earlier it would make sense as due to the nature of the ODP it's unlikely or at least rare for such sites to get listed.

Wikipedia was an early adopter of the nofollow value of the rel attribute for link attributes.

I know that there are differences between them and the DMOZ, but both projects share some similarities in spirit, and possible effect upon the web.

The folks at the wikipedia ended up rolling back their decision to use nofollow, and made the decision in an open and intelligent manner, which is probably worth looking at in a discussion about whether or not the DMOZ should use nofollow for their links. The entries on the vote and the votes make for interesting reading. Not just for the commentary on why nofollow is or isn't appropriate for wikipedia, but also because of the open and public manner in which they decided the issue.

I wish we saw that type of openness in the Open Directory.

I do think that it would remove some incentive for people to try to spam the DMOZ. And I've made this argument before. I've had some time to think about it since then. There are signs (like in the recent Google patent application on historical data) that links from authoritative sites like the DMOZ factor into relevance determinations from Google - something seemingly independant of the passing of pagerank. So, the incentive to spam really wouldn't be lessened much.

It's all a rather meaningless question. IF DMOZ added nofollow to their HTML, it makes absolutely no difference to most users of DMOZ data, since that data is extracted from the RDF files - which has no HTML coded - users create their own HTML.

seo_rat - But those duplicate page links supposedly aren't figured into link pop by GG, Y!, MSN, etc.

Bill - Wikipedia; man I like the way those guys operate - right out in the open, very honest, very transparent. Their arguments are convincing - they have the ability and the means to remove spam from the site... This just isn't the case with the ODP - you cannot determine the intent of editors from adding or removing sites, taking money for listings, applying just to have some SEO power, etc.

DMOZ is a whole other ballgame and my opinion is they really would reduce corruption if they added nofollow.

Perhaps, however, a better solution would be the major search engines publicly saying they won't count any DMOZ data in link popularity. That may be the better way to approach this.