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I'm a webdesigner hobbyist, I guess there is one in every family :-)
I have developed a site for a family member's business. This site is doing pretty well in Google for specific keywords and gives proper inforation on the products of this site. It is a "professional" site in the sense that there are no google-ads or anything like that. I designed it primarily to score well in the search engines.
Now the problem is that I submitted the site to DMOZ about a year and a half ago. The site still isn't listed. In fact only 1 site of all my 6 sites got listed after submitting.
Is there a way to be more successfull with DMOZ?
Looks to me like these guys have a lot of power but use it rather randomly.
Any ideas on this?
Thanks in advance!
v.
Well, we're certainly better off not having the "help" of people who reason like that.
There are several critical aspects to an application. But one of them is simply, CAN you do the job? Are you CAPABLE of dealing with the fine points of the ODP taxonomy?
The test is simple. Pick a very specific (small) category; find three appropriate sites that go there.
If you can't do that, what can you possibly do that we'd want done? Because that's not just part of what we do; that's ALL we do!
And if you CAN do that (and can read and write your native language fluently), then it's easy to get accepted.
I should probably mention, that webmaster abuse of submittals to some categories places them off-limits to inexperienced editors.
I bet my neck there is no a soul at DMOZ that is not a webmaster that promotes he's her's sites.
My guess is that you lose.
DMOZ is simply a form of organized Crime
It would be interesting to see what a lawyer thinks about that statement.
Well, we're certainly better off not having the "help" of people who reason like that.
You missed the plot. They denied not on the basis of incorrect editing of 3 sample sites. Being an editor myself of a familiar directory, I can be sure about that. Just that I was not a dmoz editor before. Seeing the sites listed in the category I applied to and the way they were edited, look horrible. Use of language in first person, keywords in Title et al.
I don't take pleasure in dmoz bashing, nor do I like seeing the demise of it. It was a wonderful creation for the larger good of internet, placing public interest before profits. Times I feel some of its rigidity and inflexibilty hinder its growth. Internet is growing exponentially and sadly dmoz isn't keeping pace. We are seeing just the beginning.
Should dmoz be of any practical relevance to the fast paced morrow, it has to find ways to move things a lot quicker.
I bet my neck there is no a soul at DMOZ that is not a webmaster that promotes he's her's sites.
I am an editor and yes I have my own site. I can edit in ~50 cats (only one involved my sites --- in the other 49 I have no competitors)
BUT, I have only ever met 3 other editors in real life. None of them had their own site. One of them did not even know what SEO stood for. One was a high school teacher who became an editor as part of a class project; another was a doc who edited in their area of speciality; the other was a university academic who edited in their discipline.
Where did you get your information about all editors being webmasters?
Did it ever occur to you that the ODP ought only to list one of your domain names? (It's your responsibility to link to all your content, whatever domain names it's under: if you don't, then why should we? and if you do, then why do we need to?) And thus, (assuming you have listable content) the ODP has done exactly what it should?
No...that's much too realistic. Sorry. Shouldn't even have mentioned it.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming, mentioning only that de-programming is possible for those who actually want to return to reality.
Did it ever occur to you that the ODP ought only to list one of your domain names? (It's your responsibility to link to all your content, whatever domain names it's under: if you don't, then why should we? and if you do, then why do we need to?)
I just noticed this thread, and was a little surprised by the above response.
So are you saying that if someone has a site about, say, woodworking, and they also have a site about cars, and assuming that they each have useful, unique content, and they each have their own domain, then only one site should be listed(assuming the editors considered each of the sites worthy of being listed on their own merits for their own categories)?
It seems to me you're saying that there is no need for DMOZ to link to a site about cars if the webmaster's site about woodworking is already included. In other words, if the site about woodworking is accepted, then the webmaster can simply link to his/her other site about cars, and there is no reason for DMOZ to do so.
Doesn't it seem that for the DMOZ user this doesn't make any sense at all, and is not helpful for the person looking for sites about cars? It seems to me there is a clear reason to link to both sites separately in their respective categories (again assuming that they provide useful, unique information relevant to their category).
>My sites all conform to their policies...Figuring out why an editor will see this statement as intrinsically self-contradictory is left as an exercise to the reader.
Wouldn't this be intrinsically self-contradictory only if the sites are similar/related? I didn't notice in this thread that this was established. In other words, if they are in distinctly separate fields, why is this statement intrinsically self-contradictory?
I'm really trying to understand the logic here, if one of the goals of DMOZ actually is to provide a useful categorized directory of web sites that provide unique and meaningful content to its users.
And if they are "my" websites, how are they unrelated? Arguably business and hobby interests should be kept separate, but beyond that it's hard for a disinterested observer to see an honest reason for multiple domains -- so their existance is a tacit admission that the owner is pulling something dodgy, and is afraid that his reputation will keep pace with him unless he goes to some effort to hide his identity.
The ODP lists "personal" websites, which might include whatever interests a person might have; in addition, sites by, um, highly focused persons (we can't say "fanatic" in here, I presume) would be listed in more specific categories.
And in those very rare "exceptional cases" where a person contributes exceptionally significant content in multiple areas, then the ODP considers deeplinking.
Business websites are treated similarly: the website is considered to be about the business, not about "one particular good or service that the business is offering." This is, of course, an advantage to customers who thus get a better idea of the full range of the business's capabilities. Promoting the business is not the ODP's job. Meaningful exceptions are exceedingly rare for personal businesses, and not all that common for small-to-medium-size businesses.
From this surfer-centric, information-valuing standpoint, the question recently raised elsewhere in these forums "which is better, five large sites or 1000 small sites?" is pathological. Anything but a single honest site, fully describing the business, is disengenuous.
I recognize that that perspective and thus that conclusion may represent the minority in these forums.
That said, there are a lot of people who set up multiple sites and claim that they are separate when they are clearly the same site, like a travel site that has different URLs for different countries--it's clearly the same travel site. They are especially the same site if they in some way lead you into the same sales engine, or sell the same products, or something like that.
On the other topic:
I am a DMOZ editor, and obviously I listed my own sites (two of them anyway; I'm not an editor in the category the 3rd belongs to). However, I also listed all my competitors sites, because they fit the category, and I added them independently (I know who they are), not because they were submitted. I even cooled one site that competes with mine because it clearly is the dominant site in my niche (it's run by a massive media organization and it's actually where most of my own content network adwords hits come from).
Anyway, just because a dmoz editor has their own site and listed it doesn't mean they're out to harm the competition. There are sites in my niche I didn't list, becuase they were spam/scraper sites with no real value, or just landing pages, or whatever. But that's an objective decision I think any dmoz editor would have made.
While I think probably most dmoz editors have their own site somewhere, and maybe even joined for that reason, I also think most editors are fair and objective.
Hats off to you. I hope that there are lots of editors like you at DMOZ (not for the sake of webmasters, but to actually make it an effective directory for users).
..beyond that it's hard for a disinterested observer to see an honest reason for multiple domains -- so their existance is a tacit admission that the owner is pulling something dodgy, and is afraid that his reputation will keep pace with him unless he goes to some effort to hide his identity...
Unfortunately, through your multiple domains you have (from hutcheson's perspective) made a tacit admission that you are pulling something dodgy :)
