TheHelper is an editor in the dmoz.org - Open Directory Project

The Helper

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TheHelper is an Editall/Catmv in the Open Directory Project - dmoz.org

I was an editor in the Open Directory Project. dmoz.org - an Editall/Catmv to be exact. One step away from Meta Editor. I have been editing the dmoz since around 2000 or possibly even earlier.

Anyway, in order to get where I am at dmoz I had to devote alot of time and I have made well over 10000 edits on that directory. If you look at the profile link above you will notice that I am a Top Level Games Editor. Top Level Editor is an accomplishment in itself.

I first discovered Dmoz from watching the referring sites of my website logs. Someone had actually taken the time to add me to this directory and it seemed to be mirrored many other places. I always wondered how sites found there way onto the search engines besides just submitting them directly. The search engines, back in the day, treated a dmoz.org entry like gold because it was reviewed by a real person. Like the Yahoo directory except it was free.

This dmoz.org, it intrigued me. I signed up in the Blizzard Entertainment Fan Pages section and did the dmoz editor thing. I added my site and every other site like mine. I started building categories and hunting new sites and cataloging. Building the Dmoz.org games section wherever I wanted. I was interested in Console Games, Web Based Games and of course Blizzard Games :)

I have won a couple of awards in my dmoz days, earlier on in my tenure there. I was really really into it for a while. These awards are displayed on my Profile Page. I moved up in the organization and had a reputation as a helpful and active editor.

I also spent a bunch of time helping in the Resource Zone forum and in other unofficial Dmoz forums under pseudonyms.

Anyhow, since dmoz used to be a huge factor before google took off and in the early days Google gave alot of ranking to Dmoz pages. and the dmoz pages had links to the editors profiles. Also, Google mirrored the Dmoz directory under a top level domain and that page was like an 8 or 9. It had a direct link to my dmoz.org profile which made it even powerful. The editor profiles could have links to the editors personal sites. You could always add css to HTML enable your profile as well. I added links on my profile to TH.net and my business site.

That link from my dmoz.org profile to thehelper.net gave this site a Page Rank 7 - and a high 7 at that. Later it dropped to a six but it was a high six and stayed that way until my site Administrators messed up and got us penalized by Google for a long time there. Our page rank was stripped and when we finally got it back after having to contact Google it had been so long they could not even tell us why.

None of this was planned. It just happened. I did not get Top Level games because of this benefit. This benefit just happened after I got there. The next thing I know thehelper.net is blowing up on World Editor on the Search Engines because of the link from my dmoz.org profile. Which I later found out.

More on this later.... Remember, this is back in 2004.
 
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The Helper

Necromancy Power over 9000
Staff member
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Here is something from 2012 that kind of puts my Google Page Rank results from being a top level Dmoz editor at the time into focus


At that point when the above link in 2012 was posted I do not even think dmoz.org was a thing anymore. The thing is though - Google would not be Google if it was not for dmoz.org. There is no history that talks about this. The only other directory that was authoritative was yahoo and if Google would have crawled them for there search engine seed they would have been totally sued.
 
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