Dmoz, one of the longest-running directories on the Internet will close on 14 March 2017. The Directory Listings played a huge role in the early days of the Internet, especially if they were curated by companies or online volunteers.
These directories were needed because they were originally machines searchs were not as effective as today. For example Dmoz predates Google. At the same time, Netscape had as its main rival the program browsing Internet Explorer. To mention that since then there is also Opera.
So in the "stone age" of the internet they used directories to find interesting websites, and they considered it much better than using a search engine.
Webmasters of course used (and used) the directories as a way of promoting their web pages. Of course, there was a lot of abuse of the service, especially when the automated directories were launched, showing any website without any human control.
Famous directories were Dmoz or Yahoo Directory.
Links in these directories could guarantee not only a steady stream of visitors to the site but also a very powerful backlink that added more credibility to the site in search engines.
The announcement published by Dmoz does not mention the reasons for terminating the service.
Dmoz belongs to AOL, and the decision to close the site should have come from AOL.
The site as mentioned above at the beginning of the publication will stop running on 14 March 2017.
Note that from March 14th onwards, the NOODP meta tag will no longer be needed, as it was needed to prevent search engines from using searching results the description of the site where Dmoz was.
