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.
