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The ODP does seem to cause SEOs and webmasters a tremendous amount of stress. In the interest of lowering the national blood pressure level, here's something important you need to understand if you're going to get the most you can out of the ODP for the least wasted effort: you're thinking of us the wrong way. We're not a website promotion service--we're a completely different service, whose goals just sometimes happen to overlap with webmasters' goals. So you really need to be approaching us in an entirely different way... not how good or bad the service we're providing you is, but whether you can make our goals coincide with yours enough to get us to benefit you. If you've been to business school, this ought to be sounding familiar to you.
To do this you have to understand what our goals are, then figure out how to get yours to mesh with that. You wouldn't, for example, expect Newsweek magazine to run keyword-packed articles about why your business is better than all the competition. Their goal isn't to promote your business; it's to provide their readers with news. If you give Newsweek an interview about a relevant news topic, however, perhaps they would publish it and you would accrue some name recognition in the process. Well, the ODP's goal is to provide websurfers with organized access to as much information as possible. So you want our users to find your clients' sites if they look for them, and we do too. Harmony!
If only all webmasters and SEO's would focus on that one point of agreement, we could all be happy. Unfortunately, a lot of people desperately want us to do other things for them, such as make their URL come up first on Google searches, or make their business sound better than their competition's, or list 20 mirrors of their site, or--most often--to list their site FIRST, this minute, before any others. These things do NOT coincide with our goals--we don't care which site comes up first in search engines as long as surfers can find useful information on the topic, we want to eliminate mirrors because our users don't like wasting their time wading through them, and adding sites in any order is equally good (if anything, it's better for our users if I add five sites to the empty category of an obscure author than five more web designers to a field that already includes hundreds.)
There ARE things you can do to improve your chances of quick listing (though they're no guarantee). They all have to do with getting it so that doing what you want accomplishes our goals. Submit >one< URL for each client to the >one< most appropriate category in the directory.* If you submit mirrors and deeplinks and portals and other tricks, or if you submit the site to lots of different categories, processing your submissions will be a pain and editors may choose to process other URLs instead. Submit each URL >once< and do not continue re-submitting it. Resubmitting will move your submission to the bottom of the queue and editors will be less likely to get to it. Resubmitting a site once it's been published is a waste of everybody's time; we don't measure "freshness." Use the >title of the company or website< for the title of your submission, and keep your description short. Editors are not likely to consider submissions titled "MATERNITY CLOTHES MATERNITY BRAS MATERNITY UNDERWEAR MAMA MONA'S MATERNITY IS THE BEST!" a high priority. Call it "Mama Mona's Maternity" and your chances for a quick review will improve. Extra keywords are just going to be trimmed by the editor anyway when she finally gets to it, so save time and leave them out. Contrary to popular belief, ODP descriptions can't affect PageRank anyway, so only send description updates if ours is actually incorrect, and leave a note explaining why; updates to fiddle with keywords are among the things that match our goals least, so don't expect to see them happen often.
Finally, pass it on. The more spam and attempts to manipulate the directory collect in our unreviewed, the longer it will take for everybody's >one< submission to get added. This is not a disaster to us--as long as we are regularly adding sites for our users, we and they don't really care if yours is among them. (This is why webmasters are always so much more upset about the large unreviewed queue than editors, by the way--it's not our goal to process submissions quickly, it's our goal to add as many good sites as possible. Sometimes both those things go hand in hand, but when the unreviewed queue is full of spam and multiple submissions, our rate of publication can actually be much faster if we do our own searching.) So one of your clients' sites languishing in unreviewed is not an emergency for us, but I understand how it may be an emergency for YOU. If you and your friends all forego spamming and simply submit stuff we're looking for in the first place, your clients' URLs would start getting listed more. You know that cooperate-defect game? Cooperate! You will always score higher in the end! Work it out on your computer if you don't believe me! (-:
Besides, even if everyone else does keep spamming up a storm, if your submission is correctly titled and described, submitted once to the right place, and doesn't have a lot of mirrors and deeplinks to track down, it is much more likely to get processed before the rest of the junk in the queue, so it's win-win for you.
Hope that helps,
Flicker
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* There are a >few< exceptions to the one-listing-per-site rule, which you may already know: you can also submit a site to the Regional category for its town if they have a physical storefront there. You can submit a site to an additional category in the World directory if it is genuinely bilingual or multilingual (not machine-translated, mind). If a site is informational or educational in nature and has subpages with substantive information on different topics, those subpages MAY be valuable to us. On the other hand, some kinds of sites, such as affiliate selling programs, are NEVER valuable to us. Don't spend your energy complaining about or trying to circumvent this rule while your competitors are out finding other, effective ways of promoting affiliate sites. If you have a screw to turn, don't try to steal my hammer to bang on it with; I need that for the nails, and it won't help you anyway. Go find a screwdriver! :-D
any info from the inside on the submission servers timing out? how much longer are we supposed to be suffering?
thanks.
Well, yes, naturally, that's EXACTLY what is most urgently needed ... by spammers.
"Hey, John, I just submitted your "myalias5.com domain, but it didn't show on the unreviewed list. They must know it's a spam domain. Time to pay another $6.95. Is myalias6.com taken?"
Later...
"Hmm. I submitted myalias6.com and it doesn't show either. They must think I'm a _spammer_ or something. Hang on while I delete cookies and try again ... no, try with Opera...no, hmmm..."
That's right. Power tools for spammers. We aren't in that business.
Hutcheson's got another good point there: we're not going to make any changes to our system which will increase the spam problem. Way too many editor-hours are already getting spent clearing garbage out of the submission queue; anything that makes that problem worse is *highly* unlikely ever to get implemented, im-hoe.
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Disclaimer: This post constitutes an unofficial, personal opinion not necessarily shared by other ODP editors, the university, or my cats.
