DMOZ Listing Ruining Google Rank
I’ve heard about search engines substituting web site titles and descriptions with information gathered from web directories – especially Yahoo Search using Yahoo Categories and Google relying a bit on DMOZ, but here’s a story about the DMOZ title leading to lower ranking, clicks and conversions.
V7N’s John Scott says a thread titled DMOZ Listing Penalty that Google has replaced his hosting company’s title in the Google search results with a non-descriptive title scribed by DMOZ editors.
John’s old click gathering optimized title was “V7 Quality Web Hosting – Voted Best Host of the Year.” Now, Google is serving the DMOZ listed title of V7 Inc.
John also says that his hosting company was ranked in the top 10 for “quality web hosting” before the change, but now with the new DMOZ powered title is no where to be found.
DMOZ Editor conspiracy theories aside, one has to wonder if John was on the receiving end of a Google hand job or if this is just a chance indexing flaw.
This issue also leads me to think about the value of a keyword friendly domain and company name in such a high profile business such as hosting.
Such a preemptive measure should result in more descriptive directory listings without editors falling back on the official company name.
Some Website owners anticipated that in advance (a-hem) – when choosing their URLs – even down to deciding on the hyphens. :LOL
But seriously, pehaps Editors were forced to be as objective as possible to avoid politics or accusations.
There are DEFINITELY click-penalties from both Yahoo and DMOZ, but the trade-off use to be the benefits of trusted Back links…….BUT NOT ANYMORE!!
Yahoo, now has a redirect instead of a direct link. And Dmoz has been “de-duplicated” in a sense. All the many DMOZ-ettes have now been banished from Google’s SERPS to the duplication graveyard.
So, the only other alternative is to do what others were doing a few years ago, when it was VITAL to get into Yahoo or DMOZ….
Get one “SEO-ed” URL and quality Website just for the Directories, and one optimized and Back Linked one for the Organics.
Stayin’ Alive
This is the first example I have seen that having a DMOZ title served in the Google search results has reduced ranking.
Before my vacation rentals website was removed from DMOZ (that’s another story!) when I looked at my homepage listing in Google it was showing the DMOZ title name, but didn’t affect the search engine results.
This kind of results in Google (using DMOZ titles an descriptions for a site) have been seen for several months. It seems that Google uses DMOZ information if it can’t find any trustworthy information on the site itself. Spammy repeated text is one of those non-trustworthy things on a site. Just look at the source of v7 site and you will understand what I mean (title, description, keywords). It is just a reaction to all those people wanting to trick Google with SEO techniques.
Paul, V7 Inc is not “SEO’ed”, there are no SEO techniques at play there.