A few years ago if you would have whispered “DMOZ” in someone’s ear, they would have thought you were crazy. Today the human edited directory over at dmoz.org, called the ‘Open Directory Project’, or ODP, and its dead link crushing robot called “Robozilla”, powers the results of over 200 search engines and directories. Some of the engines that use the results include AOLsearch, Netscape search, MSN, and many more. For a complete list of sites click here. As you can see, getting your site listed with ODP, means good news, as eventually ( it sometimes takes months ) your site will appear in the engines that use the ODP data. Google also uses ODP data for its directory located at http://directory.google.com (till the summer of 2011), and Google also uses the ODP description in its normal listings if the site is listed in the ODP.

There are no tricks really to getting your site listed. It may help if you read the ODP guidelines here, and the submission section here.

One of the downfalls of the ODP directory, is that the editors are people just like you and I. Sometimes the category that your trying to get listed in, may have an editor that is actually one of your competitors, so getting listed may take a bit. Be sure that when you submit your site, that its not ‘under construction’, and that there isn’t any broken links. This is important.