Firstly, I am not a SEO expert. In fact, I am rather bad knowing how the WWW (not to talk about the Internet as a whole) works.
A year ago a (geek) friend of mine told me that to be on the Open Directory Project (Dmoz) was cool to promote our project of Indo-European Language Revival. Now I know that (obviously) it’s mostly a question of Pagerank and Google.
A year ago I sent what we had, our website dnghu.org, which was scarce in its original content, although it was not under construction, and it offered already some material on the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction; it followed all rules for site suggestion, even the appropriate category: Proto-Indo-European.
A year ago I found some websites in the Proto-Indo-European category, which were already for 2006-2007 a bad suggestion for knowing/learning Indo-European; there were/are still some other very good ones, like the Indo-European Etymological Dictionary, the Indo-European Roots index, the interesting Piotr Gasiorowski’s site, an article on Kurgan Culture, and indeed Kortlandt studies.
There are also some (apparently) simple HTML web pages with an original article on it – i.e., a one-page research of someone (or some) who preferred to publish their personal opinions or reflections about PIE (or its dialects, as the page on Illyrian) online.
The rest of it, i.e. those “summaries” of PIE, and “demonstration” websites, were maybe good in 1998, when we only had that kind of introductory stuff in the net. But now, most of them have little content concerning the actual PIE reconstruction, and some are even still under construction (¡?).
I have sent again our site – I think more than one year after the first time. I don’t know why our site was rejected then – unfortunately, editors at Dmoz face probably too many requests for inclusion to answer them all -, but, really, if our resources on Proto-Indo-European aren’t for them as good to be listed at least among those ‘introductions’, I can only think of these answers:
1. There are no editors for that section. If that’s the case, I could become an editor myself to delete some deprecated stuff and add dnghu.org – and maybe other pages (like TITUS) not included in this category, but elsewhere on Indo-European languages; it doesn’t sound like ‘fair play’ to me, though, but I think it could anyway save all Google users from this stuff…
2. The editor/s are owners of those websites, edited them and don’t want/have time to edit anymore – it could be, but most of them don’t show any ads, so the benefit doesn’t exist – but for the American Heritage Dictionary, which shows a link to a rather simple summary of PIE apart from its main Root index, both of them in the same website. In any case, to reveal the actual identity of those involved couldn’t hurt anyone (if properly advised to all of them), and it could save us some unuseful thinking.
3. There are editors, and they are not related to those websites, but no one is willing to add a website like an “Indo-European Revival Association” to that linguistics section – in that case, they should re-read what the web suggestion says and what is said about the appropriate category to choose : Even if what we proposed were an artificial language, a ‘conlang’ (which is not), what we offer in our site is still the same as those sites on Proto-Indo-European: free online resources about the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language.
Anyway, I couldn’t be annoyed, even if it was worth it to be in Dmoz at any price; because I myself work in what I like (i.e. PIE resources) for free, and I do what I can the best I can. And I hate when people just criticize how bad this or that free resource of ours is, and don’t even try to help us improve it. ODP people are just doing their best since 1998, and it’s still a good place to look for other content – that which is not found with a simple Google search.
My thanks to them for achieving that.
PD- Btw. I thought about writing this post after reading this thread in their forum, where some ODP editors answer complaints like those we’ve all had sometime about the work in a free collaborative project like theirs.
