Link Building via DMOZ : You Down with ODP?

Link Building via DMOZ : You Down with ODP?

Yeah del.icio.us and Technorati are excellent 2.0 tools for pinpointing active sites for enhanced organic link and citation building, but Rob Sullivan’s latest post at the Text Link Brokers blog busts out some of dat old school linkage building juice which sometimes gets overlooked in the here and now.

Besides submitting one’s site to the Netscape Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and hoping for inclusion after a couple months, there are other methods which can be used to build links via DMOZ. Rob Sullivan at Text Link Brokers says that there’s an untapped market of link building at DMOZ just waiting to be taken advantage of.

But there’s more to DMOZ than just a location to submit for a good text link. In fact, there’s a whole world of data out there just waiting to be exploited. So why not do it?

So, what does Rob suggest doing while you’re sitting around waiting to see if your site shows up in DMOZ? Getting proactive and contacting sites already listed:

The ODP allows you to do keyword searches. Using keyword searches you can find other sites which could potentially rank in regular search engines for your terms.

If you search for your terms you can gather a list of sites that already have ODP listings and then go to Google, Yahoo! and MSN and query the engines for their backlinks, providing yet another source of link requests.

For example, if I search for “search engine marketing” I see that there are 1188 matches. Granted some aren’t competitors, but there are a few sites I’ve never heard of before.

So, in addition to gathering some competitive intelligence about the competitors, I can also check to see what their backlink potential is and also see if they’ve managed to find links I hadn’t considered before.

Let’s look at some of the potential link sources we’ve found already:

-almost 1200 potential directories
-almost 350 potential search engine submissions
-175 web communities and portals which may accept submissions
-over 400 sites using ODP data

Plus, who knows how many competitors you may not have previously identified.

And all this from the directory that much of the SEO community has given up on.

Yeah Rob… You down with ODP, yeah you know me!

I’m in full agreement here, don’t overlook ODP/DMOZ as a resource of ‘quality’ sites for adding to your link building campaign and competitive intelligence and not just a 5 minute stop on the directory list to submit a site to and never return again. Even if your site takes forever to get listed, soliciting links from other sites in the directory will probably add to some quicker responses and enhanced indexing of your site.

Now the question of successfully building these links and getting in contact with these site owners is quite different 🙂