Thursday, September 18, 2008

BOTW To Buy DMOZ! (End Of Free Reviews?)

According to a post on Shoemoney, BOTW, Best Of The Web is on it's way to acquire DMOZ. DMOZ had so far maintained a premier position on the web directories due to several reasons. The strict control of listing, and the association of companies like Google that relied on the directory maintained by AOL to create it's own Google Directory.
According to the article, BOTW has already hired those top editors away from the DMOZ and by any means doing much better than DMOZ already.
In the age of Google looking down on web directories, (Page rank drops etc) DMOZ (and BOTW) maintain a heafty ranks. But there is a big difference between DMOZ and BOTW. DMOZ is free and wether your site get included might boil down to a boil in the pants of those volonteer editors. I have managed to get some of my sites included but sometimes I wonder if it is worth it.
BOTW on the other hand charges a $249.99 review fee which is a prerequisite. BOTW also makes the point that their review for inclusion is not a guarantee of inclusion in their directory.
But I doubt that many people get excluded but I have not tried nor do I know the inner working of BOTW. But Google thinks they are good enough to give them a high PageRank.

I have no idea nor the Shoemoney, how the drama may unfold. But it might turn pages, web pages pretty soon. May be it is time we down loaded a copy of the directory. A few years ago we started parsing the directory for one of our search engines but I have not visited the DMOZ recently. Hope BOTW do good to DMOZ.

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