Dmoz – the Open Directory project – has been going for years.

At the time of writing, it had 4,258,294 sites listed by 89,262 editors (nearly all of whom are volunteers) in over a million categories.

It’s varied in importance over the years. At one stage, Google used it as their directory but that stopped in 2011.

In theory, getting listed in Dmoz is simple. But there are a few things to consider:

The directory is split into categories – you need to drill down to choose the best possible fit.

That means if you’re a plumber you need to drill down to the town you’re based in. Or the district of the town if that’s available. Then choose the category within that town where other plumbers are listed. The same goes for any other business or website.

The Dmoz search is relatively primitive but you can find towns or districts easily enough and then just click a few links until you find the best fit:

Quite a few of these will have sub-categories below them.

For instance, the Business and Economy section in the town above has these sub-catgories:

Those vary by town and category so you’ll likely find different options in different places.

It’s up to each individual editor to put the relevant sites in the best fit but you stand the highest chance of getting listed if you choose what you think is the best fit in the first place.

The next thing you can do to increase the chance of getting listed in Dmoz is to write your site description in the correct tone.

Dmoz aims to list sites in editorial style – no hype.

Check some of the other listings in your chosen section and model your suggested description on them.

That doesn’t mean your description will get used.

The volunteer Dmoz editors are at liberty to change the description you suggested to better fit the site style.

They’re also at liberty to change the section if they think another one would fit better.

Or ignore or delete your submission if they choose to do so.

It’s not a democracy!

There’s also no set timescale for getting listed.

Each editor is autonomous and because they are volunteers, they log into the site as and when they get time.

Which is why it’s worth making their job as easy as possible.

If you submit your site to the highest possible level (plumbers worldwide for instance) then you get gradually moved inside Dmoz to a better, lower level, location. Or deleted if they think you’re being stupid – that varies by editor.

That means the time before you finally get approved takes longer as each editor only has a certain amount of categories they are responsible for.

The other thing to keep in mind is that a link from Dmoz is nowhere near as important as it used to be.

So don’t spend lots of time worrying about whether or not your link has made the grade and been accepted.

Directories are a small part of the link pattern that Google are looking for and Dmoz is a small part of that small part. The big plus point is that Google’s algorithm knows that Dmoz is edited by real people, so a listing in the site can be useful.

You can get listed in other directories – a lot of which are at least kind-of human edited – and either hunt them down yourself or use a paid-for service like Directoy Maximizer to do the job for you at the price of a few cents per entry. That frees up your time for less mundane work.