hutcheson - 6:18 am on Aug 31, 2006 (gmt 0)

If you are designing the site to obtain multiple ODP listings, then chances are extremely high that it is not something that would be listable even once.

Current sites did not get deeplinked by being LIKE some other site that was already deeplinked; they got deeplinked, often without being concerned about the ODP at all, but by being UNLIKE any other site on the net -- and by gaining a reputation among searching editors as reliable places to find content.

There are some exceptions; in the beginning the ODP worked closely with some particularly content-rich sites to flesh out particular parts of the directory. As time went by, some of those deeplinks have been removed; other similar sites appeared later, and the community decided NOT to deeplink them systematically: the first site is always by definition unique, but the second site may not be. Traces of some of those early working relationships still remain -- some still for the better, some not enough for the worse that it's become a priority to pull them out by the roots.