What the Founder of Dmoz Knows about SEO

Glen Allsopp / 2 Comments / August 23rd, 2007 / Subscribe via RSS

For those of you who don’t know, Rich Skentra was the founder of Dmoz, the best known directory on the web and is also the CEO of Topix. Judging by this pretty impressive portfolio it should be no surprise he knows a thing or two about SEO…or does he?

In a recent post on his personal blog, Rich gave some on-page SEO advice for Mahalo, so today I’m going to look through it and see if he really knows what he’s talking about.

Point 1:

Hyphens instead of underscores, Jason! C’mon guys this is basic stuff.

I’ll give Rich some credit on this one because until recently a lot of people thought the same. Search Engine Land confirms now though that this is not the case and all 4 major search engines treat Underscores and hyphens the same. Rich’s blog doesn’t even do this so I’m not sure why he even mentioned it.

-1

Point 2:

Put the guide note under the <h1> and call it <h2>, it’ll do better. Mahalo needs lots of guide notes. Without the contiguous block of text from the guide note, the links aren’t enough to validate a landing. 250 words is ideal but anything is better than nothing.

The text ‘ Guide Note’ is not under anything but I’m not sure if its worth being an <h1> or <h2>, <h2> if anything though. Rich makes a good point, basically what he is saying in that in order for the page to be more than links this block of text under the guide note is important. Beefing this out a bit might help up the quality of the page in the eyes of the Search Engine’s although I don’t think it would make that big of a difference. I’ll explain why at the end.

+1

Point 3:

<title> should match <h1> should match url. Don’t forget to add <meta name=”description”>, this should match the <h2>

On pages I have checked the title is matching the <h1> fine and the URL’s are good. There is currently no descriptions on the search results, which probably should match the guide note as mentioned. Well spotted Rich

+1

Point 4:

Not really seo but a general idea … Reference pages in general are boring. Jason is the supreme master of linkbait… Could each mahalo page be turned into a controversy of its own? When someone biases a wikipedia page, it gets more attention and traffic, not less…

I guess this could work so he scores a point for mentioning linkbait. I do however think that Jason is only interested in creating solid, clean results and would have no interest in stirring up controversy.

+1

Does he know what he is talking about?

With a not-so-serious score of 3/4 I think Rich Skrenta has a clue about on-page SEO and has pointed out some aspects that Jason should take notice of. No matter how much Jason Calacanis wants to go away from doing ‘SEO’, having a description tag is basic web design unless I’ve missed it. With a portfolio consisting of two of the biggest sites on the web when its hard to own 1, Rich is doing pretty well for himself.

Does Mahalo deserve to rank?

I’m not being harsh here but if I’m not mistaken, according to new changes in the Google Guidelines you shouldn’t  be allowing search results to be indexed. Maybe it should be up to Google to sort this out and not the webmaster but Mahalo’s search results are still ranking. Of course, it may not be that way for long.

P.S. Don’t go looking over this site. I have some work to do yet

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