Do your hear the TAPS playing for DMOZ now?  I do.

DMOZ is the Open Source Directory Project. Or was. I'm not sure if the service is dead. Dying or on Financial Life Support. All I know is the site is not working and nobody seems to care about fixing it.  I've been trying DMOZ now for months. I get the same screen below every time I try to add a URL to them. 

So Brett, Billie, Jane... I'm working away on your SEO... but I think someone out there just pulled out one of the legs on the chair I was standing on. It's not a death sentence, it just means we have to do more on incoming links, Twitter bursts and some page content. 

Does anyone else out there on ActiveRain know anything about DMOZ?  Enquiring minds want to know! 

If you're not familiar with DMOZ, technically speaking, this is where the Internet started it's first catalog of everything on the planet.

Websites.

Cameras.

Even Real Estate offices.

It used to be that getting your Website into DMOZ was something to really Yahoo about (pun intended.). Getting listed into DMOZ means that AOL, Google and the other search engines could start indexing you and ranking you higher in the Natural Organic Search Engine Results Page results (SERP).  Today, Blogging and Twittering seems to be a fast way to get this done but so many people are not Blogging the right way, and a lot more are not using Twitter effectively. 

Google has become the household word now as evidenced that the phrase, "Google it," is now a part of Webster's dictionary now I think. Who uses the Yellow Pages anymore? Your computer, iPhone or Blackberry has Google so you just use that instead. 

It's never been easy or fast to add your website to DMOZ largely because they are not run by robots, crawlers, and a lot of the automation doo-dah's you'd expect to find at Bing / MSN, Yahoo! or Google.

DMOZ is run by live people. They manually approve sites submitted to them. Sometimes it takes months to get even reviewed. Why? Because the editors are not paid to read your emails and try to figure out where to put your website if you submitted it to the wrong category. DMOZ Editors are non-paid volunteers. 

The site is always asking for people to become editors, but that's not easy to become one, either.

Let's assume you're a real estate agent and you have a real estate website you want to get listed into DMOZ.

It sort of becomes a conflict of interest for you to be a REALTOR in Pleasantville and naturally, you want your site to be listed and you want to be an Editor at the same time. So you might not want other broker or agent websites to be listed in Pleasantville. Just yours. 

For that reason alone, it's hard to fake your way into the good graces of DMOZ as an editor and getting your Real Estate Website listed at the same time.

So forget the Editor part. You submit your website. And you wait. And you wait. And you wait. 

And weeks or sometimes months later -- you get approved. But 90% of them submitted get denied.  

But getting approved means you have to make your website read like plain vanilla when you describe it.

You cannot use words like;

• We're #1.
• Premiere Realty in Pleasantville.
• Etc., etc.

You must be very, very careful to tone down the use of any flowery, or puffy marketing statements about your site. So getting listed into DMOZ required that you wrote your description like a librarian is the only rule to follow.

Like the sample below. 

DMOZ has been really quiet for year. I've yet to get anybody's website listed there for over 14 months now and in my opinion, they've been largely forgotten about and is about to become extinct. 

If you Google the phrase:  DMOZ is DEAD, you get a lot of links with other people like me who seem to be wondering where the Editors are, and what the heck is going on with DMOZ anymore.

Sharks can smell blood in the water, and the Bartman predicts that Steve Balmer (Microsoft) will want to buy DMOZ out or maybe one day, Google will. Until then, we should all keep a watchful eye on what happens with DMOZ. 

Because once upon a time, it was the only way to guarantee your website would ever be seen in the Yahoo, Google and other search engines and directories.