Web Directory

Are web directories still an effective way to promote a website?

DMOZ, the Open Directory Project March 2017 marked the closing of DMOZ, the open Directory Project. DMOZ was set up with the aim of human editors to organise and reference all websites on the World Wide Web. It was set up in 1998, the same year as Google, as direct competition to Yahoo Directory, which was seen as becoming too dominate. Before we had search engines there was no way to search for websites, people had to simply remember the names of them, which as the number of websites increased became increasingly difficult. Web directories were set up as a way to list these websites so that people could browse through categories to find a specific website that they required. However, as the number of websites dramatically increased and with the move to machine generated results over human searches web directories started to take more of a back seat and DMOZ decided to close after 19 years of existence.