Dmoz has been a great tool in the SEO arsenal since the industry was in its infancy. Sure, you have to be meticulous about crafting your link within their guidelines, and you'll probably wait several months before your link is ever seen by an editor. Still, it's probably the most important free directory out there, and if you can get listed it's a great boost for your site's link popularity.

Of course, this is such common SEO advice that there's almost no point in repeating it. Everyone and their mother knows that a Dmoz submission goes right up there with domain name selection when it comes to establishing a website. What they rarely mention is why. Why exactly is Dmoz so bloody important? As it turns out, there are several reasons.

• It's well-ranked. It's got a PageRank of 8, 300,000 inbound links in Google, two million in MSN, and over 10 million in Yahoo. Even its innermost subdirectories maintain respectable measures of importance. Few other directories can hold a candle to it.
• Search engines trust it. Dmoz is often used to generate search result snippets, so much so, in fact, that the search engines instituted a new meta tag to let webmasters say when not to use it. That sort of trust doesn't come easily.
• Everyone likes to copy it. Dmoz is so deep and detailed that dozens of other directories simply duplicate its listings. Heck, even Google does it. And while none of these other directories have anywhere near the weight of the original, they still amount to a lot of link distribution with minimal effort. Send in the clones.

For the past few months, however, Dmoz has been flatlining. New submissions and editorial access have been down since late October due to a large-scale hardware failure. Yes, you read that correctly; it's been inactive for seven weeks, with nary a word being spoken by the admins as to when it might come back up.

So should we give up on Dmoz? Given the issues it had with editors even before it went down, should we turn to a more collaborative solution like the good folks over at SEOmoz have suggested? Is Dmoz on its death bed waiting for a new directory model to carry the torch as cofounder Rich Skrenta says?

I'm all for new solutions. If someone develops a new ODP that works better, I'll definitely be adding it to my directory submission checklist.

Still, I'm not about to disregard Dmoz. As all the points above indicate, there's plenty of value in a Dmoz listing. More importantly, it's the sort of value that isn't developed overnight. Even if Dmoz loses some value as a result of this extended outage, it'll still be well worth the effort to submit. Heck, even if they lose so many editors that I only have a 10% chance of getting reviewed in the first year, I'll still be submitting. There's just too much potential value to ignore.

Besides, this isn't the first Dmoz doomsday by a long shot. Dmoz has had plenty of problems in the past and always seems to recover. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up looking back on the "Great Dmoz Outage of '06" as just another violent hiccup.

Update: According to the Dmoz website, editorial access has been restored but everything else (like the site submission form) is still down. This definitely comes as welcome news, although not all we were hoping for. My guess is that editors are being let in first to whittle down the submission backlog, after which everything will be reactivated. Who knows? Maybe Dmoz is in for a happy New Year after all.