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I've searched through various threads about this, but couldn't find anything recent about it. If our sites can't get into DMOZ are they always going to be in trouble with Google, or can we overcome it through more quality links in?
I never had a problem getting into DMOZ a few years ago, but now when I try, I notice that my sites aren't getting included, and when I inquire at the DMOZ forum, they say that you can have one site in DMOZ, and if you want your other sites in as well, then you should link from the one included site to the others (even if they have completely unique and useful content, and are on different topics). I'm not trying to submit any duplicate content sites, it's all unique, and definitely not spamming.
Anyway, the main question is whether I can do well in Google SERPS even without DMOZ?
Upon checking the list, guess what? My closest competitor is still there which has similar structure to my site minus the forum, blog, and news section and aggressively promoting some affiliate program.
What was the response when you reported this alleged abuse in the approproiate place?
Highly accurate rule... Is it a 'money word' search? If yes check DMOZ. Is it in the DMOZ? If site/domain (abc.com) is in DMOZ THEN rank sub page by onpage factor. If no remove from top results. (more to filter, but these are the strongest rules - IMO)
Just did a search for real estate in a much sought after region...only 3 of the top 10 were in DMOZ. Better yet number 1, 2, and 3 weren't.
But 6 of the 10 had at least part of all of the query in the url.
Not necessarily true at all. If a cat was being reviewed by an editor who had editing privs in many different cats with a whole lot of listed sites, or it was an editall or meta looking at the cat (editalls and metas can edit anywhere), they may just spot check some listed sites in a cat, rather than every one. The ODP has millions of listed sites. And a limited number of editors, all who are volunteers.
>End of story, the editor/s are unquestionable and got away with murder.
Or, perhaps the editor just made an error. There is a big difference between abuse, and less than perfect editing. It's posts like the above that can scare editors from doing much editing. If an editor makes an honest error, they are accused of having got away with murder.
What was the response when you reported this alleged abuse in the approproiate place?
Some idiotic incoherent answer that it was the editor opinion.
When ask where I could appeal the editor decision and the glaring descrepancy...silence then a brave one answered...
There is no appeal process
they may just spot check some listed sites in a cat
Oh...is it because the site is so popular in that cat that it requires a 'special culling process' aka witch hunt?
For crying out loud, it didn't take me a minute to find several similar site in that cat. The editor/s most have his/her/their blinder on.
Or, perhaps the editor just made an error. There is a big difference between abuse, and less than perfect editing. It's posts like the above that can scare editors from doing much editing. If an editor makes an honest error, they are accused of having got away with murder.
And please educate me. How do you propose should I appeal my case? Or, how do you propose to correct situation where 'perhaps the editor just made an error'... because it was made clear to me that there was no appeal process.
Or do you prefer me to shut-up thus abuse like this at ODP are just going to be swept under the proverbial rug?
Staff @ dmoz.org, you must be kidding, what staff?
It's posts like the above that can scare editors from doing much editing.
You know and I know and everybody know that's the understatement of the year.
Technically, whoever delisted the site regardless of his/her motive have gotten away with it and of course questioning that motive is labeled as conspiratorial, whining, etc..and all the champions of ODP come together to say that there's nothing wrong with ODP system.
I would love to champion the ODP cause too (I might be one of the silent editor so to speak, who knows). In fact I know that there is one editor who have appealed on my behalf to look at the site again and I don't even know that editor.
My point for all this rant is simple...abuse is flourishing at ODP and the refusal of seniors editors to proactively fine a solution or solutions to curve abuse is deafening.
The cat where my site is used to be listed is nothing but of low quality sites, one or two spam, most are laughable.
But those who have financial interest on one(?) of the remaining site listed is laughing his/her way at Google serp.
If it walks like a rat, smell like a rat, hide like a rat, in all likelyhood...it is a rat.
Google does not arbitrate their pagerank; they received it due to inbound links, etc.
Hence if they link to you, it is very good (because of their high pagerank) and if they don't, your competition beats you out.
However DMOZ is like any other PR10 site, and their methodologies or practices have very little to do with Google, as Google does not promote them in any way (except for the Google directory, which will hopefully be faded out completely)
Complaining about DMOZ not providing you the pagerank you want in essence means you are dissapointed that so many other sites link to them and source their data, thereby increasing the listed sites' PR.
I don't see what Google has to do with it. The "public" of the web have boosted its pagerank thereby making it valuable.
Who are you complaining to?
Hence if they link to you, it is very good (because of their high pagerank) and if they don't, your competition beats you out.
In a way, you have answered your own question. lol
What if the part where they link to you is being abuse just to keep you out from that it is very good (because of their high pagerank) so that the part that say your competition beats you out will happen?
Would you just walk away and everything is cool to you?
You are now owed a link, and you are not able to force them to follow their own guidelines.
They have decided that certain people will have the power to decide who they link to, just like any other site on the internet.
Brooding on it is a big waste of time. Go out and get other links.
Additionally for at least two years, and probably forever, Yahoo has gutted the pagerank of its own directory (especially the non-US ones) via idiotic/inconsistent linking. Some categories linked to yahoo.com/Secondlevel/Thirdlevel, other linked to yahoo.com/Secondlevel/thirdlevel, still others linked to yahoo.com/secondlevel/thirdlevel etc. They now seem to be much more consistently linking to the capital letter's way, and thus lower level categories are sometimes showing higher PR and getting crawled more consitently.
Bottom line, if these phenomenon continue in this month's direction (rather than the past way) I'd expect some whining in the future about Yahoo along these same lines.
There are very, very, very few sites on the Internet that are even remotely authoritative on tens of thousands of topics. Big shock, those that are end up being influential.
not really brooding about it, just pissed on the righteousness and arrogance of some people on this thread.
It seems like a lot of ODP "abuse" allegations really just boil down to "My site STILL hasn't been listed yet even though others have!" or "My site was rejected/removed for not meeting the posted guidelines but other sites that don't meet the guidelines are still in there!" Both of these are functions of the size and style of the directory. Editors are volunteers and may choose to work on any part of the directory they like so long as their work is constructive. So it's inevitable that some categories see more new sites added than others, and that some categories see more sites added through editor initiative than via the spam-clogged submissions queue, and that editors may spend the time to remove a noncopliant site that's been pointed out to them but not re-evaluate every other site in the category at the same time. It's not a uniform system--and it's not really meant to be. As long as each of us does something to improve the directory, our supervisors are happy with us, and our users are pleased. It's hard to tell, since thank-you notes are always rarer than complaints, but I think most webmasters are pleased too... at least, the webmasters of the 4 million sites that ARE listed in our directory have reason to be. (-:
How many sites do you know that have a PR10 in the home page? On top of that, how many PR10 sites that accept site listing.
Two problems with that line with reasoning...
1. How many sites are listed on that top-level PR10 page? Zip, nada, none. In DMOZ, you have to go down a few levels, at least, before you get to a point where a new site might reasonably be expected to be listed. There's probably a drop of at about one point in PR for each level. (I use a Mac here at home so I can't use the Google Toolbar to check a sample for myself.) My site is listed three levels down, so I wouldn't expect that category page to be higher than PR7.
2. OK, so PR7 (even PR6 or PR5) isn't anything to sneeze at, you say. But the page that I'm listed on has links to over a hundred sites! How much PR am I picking up from that DMOZ link, as a result?
I couldn't see any difference in my PR after I got my DMOZ listing, but my index page had PR7 to begin with, anyway.
3. dmoz.org got a 10 PR by, among other things, NOT LINKING TO YOUR SITE. Coincidence? Or significant causative factor? Who knows?
By standard SEO logic, they shouldn't risk the PR by changing anything. Fortunately, that's not what drives them -- but editors do believe what got the site a 10 PR was ignoring PR and obsessing on content. And so, when you propose that they ignore issues of content to focus on PR, and not even their own PR but yours -- yes, you must expect your suggestions to be taken as obstructive and destructive rather than constructive.
When you crash a wine-tasting party carrying a dead skunk, you must expect a negative reaction. Is that the fault of the host who feels your presence conflicts with his mission to provide a suitable environment for his purpose, or is it, perhaps, your fault for trying to browbeat the host into changing his plans to suit your desire?
You don't come across as arrogant or righteous in anyway. In fact you have tried your best to explain a non perfect twisted outdated system.
But, just can't help to notice some posters here that everytime another poster goes against the theory of the mainstream crowd...that poster is immediately put down...more like a lynch mob.
As in ODP situation, every complain post I read is immediately 'presumed' the webmaster's fault which inhibit an intelligent and logical approach to a problem without resorting to amateurish and childish postings.
The world doesn't end because my site was delisted but I sure hope that...
1. 'delisting' of sites should have the approval of 2 or more higher editors and ethical consideration should be always in the mind of those who have the power to remove a site.
Like for instance, a simple question such as...How is this site compared to other sites in this cat? Would have been suffice to delist half the site in that cat or not to delist a site because of common practice in that cat.
2. I sure hope too that web site owners should have a 'better recourse' to air their cases and just not be dismissed as 'there is no appeal', basically a ODP death sentence to a site.
Good luck with your directory.
Cheers
Why don't you get off your pedastal and talk english for a second or you just like hearing yourself talk? lol
The intent of these liberties is to entice editors to review more sites. It seems to work -- lots of sites get reviewed. It is also a matter of ethics: we are building a directory in which (as all editors know) there are many objectionable sites -- my objections, of course, being to different sites than yours would be. The community, a pragmatic social structure, doesn't claim the right to override, or even question, editors' own ethical standards. It can only say: "If you are contributing to the community goal of building a quality directory, we thank you for your help."
But the corollary is that there's no way to make any editor review any particular site. Ever. And yes, that is a determined and principled decision imposed by the ethical and social foundations on which the community is founded.
It's very difficult for a coversation to go otherwise on this board--WebmasterWorld is explicitly *not* set up for the evaluation of individual sites in these forums. Most sites that are rejected are rejected because they contain content that our guidelines expressly ask people not to submit. There are thousands and thousands of submissions like these, and all their webmasters think, or pretend to think, that their sites are the greatest thing since sliced bread, completely unique, and ought to be an exception to our rules. Of course our response to a generic question will be targeted at the most-common case... and you're not allowed to ask non-generic questions here.
The good news for you is that your #1 is true. You can always get a second opinion by going to the ODP help forum and asking about your site. You won't be given any details about why your site was rejected there--again, since such a huge proportion of rejections are spam-related, we can't risk giving out details like that. But you can rest assured that your query will cause at least one senior editor to check the rejection out. In nearly all cases the original editor was right all along, mind you, but sometimes sites are deleted in error, and I've seen rejected sites returned to the queue after another editor investigated it.
The bad news for you is that your #2 is not true. There is no appeal. If we don't want to link to your site... we don't have to. I'm sorry you consider this "twisted and outdated," but it's really just common sense. Once multiple editors have checked your site and agreed with the initial decision not to list it, it's time to pursue other avenues of site promotion. We're just like any other independent website--not every site out there is one we're interested in linking to. Luckily, as nearly everyone in this thread agrees, not being listed in the ODP isn't the kiss of death for a website anyway. (-:
Zeberdee wrote: I used to be quite a fan of Dmoz until I looked more closely at it. One of our students volunteered to be an editor and somehow was accepted. She worked well and hard over short period. Then one day, zap. She was thrown out for alleged abuse, and of course was rather upset. She came to me and I checked every edit. The quality was fine and there simply was no abuse. She was a student goodness sake, not even a webmaster.We then watched her category unravel, as someone took it upon themselves to remove a number of the entries she had added. Again, no logic, just some hidden agenda.
If you think that someone had a hidden agenda in the student's inability to edit now and in the changes to the category, you can always file an abuse report asking that it be investigated.
What happens every now and then is some editor gets an idea about a neat geographical breakdown -- some kind of region with boundaries defined by ethnicity, commerce (e.g., tourism-promotion) or topography. (Sometimes such regions can be clearly defined, and do make sense for someone primarily focused on ethnic, commercial, or geological topics.) But the rules are fairly strict about regions -- basically they must nearly always follow political boundaries. And eventually some knowledgeable Regional editor sees the non-compliant topic, and distributes its content to the proper regional categories. If you're interested in the Mogollon Rim or the Platinum Coast or Arcadia, your vision will be lost in the shuffle. But not every vision can be implemented under the aegis of the ODP guidelines.
Similar things can happen in other areas: Someone interested in Widget Bifurcation might build up a category encompassing Widget-bifurcation tool retailers, widget design, abstract theory of widgetification, and local widget shops. Again, once a senior editor sees that, "poof" and the sites get shipped out to Shopping, Business, Regional, and Science topics -- perhaps @linked together.
And then, of course, there is always the possibility that what you thought of as non-abuse was the same thing as what the abuse-investigating editors thought was abuse. Abuse is not always obvious -- metas don't always recognize it immediately -- and some editors abuse through ignorance of the guidelines or misunderstanding of the fundamental principles of the directory.
That idea is a no go from the start. You mean if I find a site that is offline, or currently totally broken, or perhaps has magically changed to a porn site when it used to be a widget safety site, as an editor I've gotta ask some other editor if it is OK to delist it? Oh joy. And, consider the implication that your proposed change would mean sites in unreviewed queues would now take on average MUCH longer to ever get looked at because the editors are now spending lots of their time approving other editors delisting sites. Your idea would NOT be an improvement.
This is usually the beginning of the end, because a refusal to co-operate and work with the group usually ends up in termination. Sometimes new editors just think their way is better, and don't survice too long.
Thouigh this would only slow the whole process down as a blanket rule, in practice, the senior editors do "keep an eye" on newbie editors. Early in my editing career, I deleted a site I meant to list. A watchful senior editor noticed this and put it back (it was obvious by the fact that my note said I was listing the site, yet I had deleted it).
Someone who worries that a delisting has been done in error can effectively get a second opinion by an experienced editor over at the ODP help forum. I saw a mistaken delisting fixed there just last week. Most site removals are by the guidelines and that's that; the forum's not a place to come and argue with us about that, but occasionally something does get removed by accident, by misjudgment, because the site has a temporary technical difficulty, or something else resolvable, and you can always double-check that senior editors agree with the decision to remove your site by asking about it there.
It's entirely possible that an editor may have taken a look at some of the sites in your category randomly, seen that your site wasn't compliant, removed it, and not gotten to the others. You've been told where you can go to get a second opinion. Apart from that, you can use the feedback feature to alert a nearby editor to a site that you believe doesn't meet the guidelines. They can then take a look at that, and if you're right, it may get removed too.
You can get a second opinion. If you believe the editor has abused their position, that's what the abuse report is for. But chances are, it's just that your site has been picked up, and the others haven't. There's no huge conspiracy against you.
And how would it help anyone to have to get multiple people to agree to delete a site? It'd take up so much time that it would be impossible for anyone to ever get listed in the first place.
