Maybe, Google heard Shoemoney and other bloggers’ cry to stop using the DMOZ (Open Directory Project) as Google’s business directory.

Last Monday, September 24, 2007, Barry Schwartz of the Search Engine Land first noticed the absence of the DMOZ in the Google SERP when searching for “DMOZ“, “Open Directory” or “Open Directory Projects“.

I think, this is part of the Google’s move against buying links. To let you know, ShoeMoney’s blog is removed from the directory by an editor because Schoe failed to pay him $5,000.

A while back I got a email from a guy claiming to be a DMOZ editor saying that I had to pay him $5,000.00 or he would have my site: shoemoney.com removed from the dmoz.

I thought nothing of it…. then today I got a email from him saying it was removed and I might want to rethink not paying him. I thought I would check just for grins.

And then when an editor of the DMOZ reacted against the extortion made by other editors, his account was then suspended.

This weekend I was reading about Shoemoney being extorted by a DMOZ editor. I thought: heck, I’m a DMOZ editor, I don’t want to be associated with stuff like that, let’s see if I can do anything to help. So I posted something like that in the commentthread to the above post, and I added a note to Shoemoney’s URL in DMOZ asking why the URL was removed.

Now pay attention: within 36 hours after doing that, my account was disabled!

We didn’t heard yet the Google’s words about it, but I assumed that burrying the DMOZ at Google SERP is the penalty for extorting money from webmasters in exchange of the DMOZ listing.

Technorati Tags: DMOZ, Open Directory Project

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