I watched a nasty trick take effect at the DMOZ today. Apparently, unscrupulous editors have been getting more and more black hat about using particularly clever techniques to foil their competitors who are listed at the directory. This particular technique came to me via an online acquaintance whose name I promised not to mention.

This editor's technique, as he controls some real estate categories at DMOZ, is to edit the titles and descriptions to be as bad as possible in terms of marketability, and since real estate is a sector where Google has been using ODP data to a greater degree, it's having a real effect on his clients' competitors in the sector. If you visit some of the categories here, you can play the "spot the good listing" game... It seems to be more pervasive than I expected. I was informed by my source that he/she (I don't know the individual's gender and don't want to make assumptions) picked this up from a friend practicing the same technique. I can only hope it's not spreading through the editorship like a bad virus.

The easy solution is for Google to drop the DMOZ listing data. They can pretend all they want that's it's non-commercial and that a 3rd-party description is more objective, but in the cutthroat world of SEO, DMOZ data is remarkably simple to corrupt for those who are dedicated to it. This particular trick is hard to catch if done well - editing all the titles and descriptions to be more "descriptive" and less "promotional" is generally preferred by the guidelines, and if one site in a few dozen happens to have a more "attractive" listing, who's going to notice?