Yet, on a blog site for webmasters last week it was claimed that: "There is a new study that says Google is 'massively' banning sites that use any DMOZ data".
Upon further investigation it becomes clear that Google is, in fact, banning "clones" that have been generated from DMOZ from showing up in its search engine result pages (SERPs) - essentially sites that strip content form DMOZ and present it as their own.
But, still, it is claimed that Google may also be banning some sites that use any DMOZ data at all.
Neither DMOZ nor Google warn that a site may be banned from the listings for using DMOZ data. In fact, DMOZ actually advise on their site how to download their data, so it would in fact be a mistake if Google were to ban any site that just uses some DMOZ descriptions on their site as, essentially DMOZ is encouraging users to utilise their data. Examples aren't conclusively given on the sites that claim Google is banning DMOZ data and so these claims, like so many things to do with search engines, can only be seen as speculation. The main difficulty in identifying the reason for a site being banned is that there are a great many other factors on cited examples that could lead to a site being banned or penalised other than the inclusion of DMOZ data.
The only conclusion to draw then, is that these claims are not a signal to worry about your DMOZ listings and resulting links. It definitively does not mean that Google is going to disregard your DMOZ listing at all. As far as is known, and there is a great weight of evidence to support this, Google places a lot of emphasis on your DMOZ listing and information. If anything, the only conclusion remaining to be drawn is that Google will be cracking down on sites that are merely stripping information from DMOZ to use on their own site.
And this crackdown is unarguably a good thing to see: removal of the useless, duplicated clones, of DMOZ from the SERPs. For what use are they other than to fill your query results with information you can easily find if you go to DMOZ itself?
As ever, it looks like mistakes that are being made do not lead to the offices of Google, rather to unscrupulous practices of spammers attempting to dupe the search engine with copied content.
