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I think there is some problem in dmoz. I have seen a number of sites belongs to the same company listed in number of cat in Dmoz. And Also dmoz editors are just submitting their own sites in categories and new submission of the same cat or same industry use to avoid. Even personally i had submitted sites to dmoz those are really having good content & PR and all and did not receive any response since 3 years or so.
I believe existing editors are not following the rules and submiting their own sites and rejecting the others.
Any idea on this.
Experienced
Hutch, thanks for that quote from the DMOZ playbook.
Is that the official response for a submission that conflicts with the financial interests of the category editor?
Apologies to those DMOZ editors who are standing tall and working hard. I know there must be at least three or four of them.
What is it about DMOZ threads that make usually sane people spout smoke and breathe fire?
Seriously. What are these threads really about? Is it lack of parental love or toliet training issues or what?
It doesn't matter whether a site has been rejected for sure, or it hasn't yet been reviewed and nobody knows when it will be. If it isn't listed NOW, then Plan A isn't working NOW. Well, if it doesn't matter whether your plans work now or in three years, that's fine with me -- I'm not involved one way or the other.
But if you care about what happens now and in the next three years, Plan B is strongly indicated. You don't need to wait for permission from an ODP editor to start working on it. (Is THAT what you call "ODP editors having power over you"? Someone gave you the impression you couldn't promote your site without my permission?)
You'd feel really stupid (well, you ought to, at least) if you waited two or three years in a strongly competitive area (and where are you more likely to wait?) to find out for sure you needed to be working on plan B. Don't wait for permission from me, or any other person totally uninvolved with your business, and knowing no reason whatsoever to care whether it succeeds or fails.
Just start Plan B NOW. Stop begging ODP editors to give you permission or motivation. You don't need permission; and for your motivational needs, find a personal coach. The ODP doesn't cure cancer or motivate salesmen: it will just send you to someone who does.
And suppose the ODP listed your site tomorrow? You'd still be sitting in the cellar under all the other webmasters who also had an ODP listing and STILL pursued Plan B.
Cut this out, and tape it to the top of your monitor:
[Plan B no longer requires ODP editor permission.]
[edited by: hutcheson at 5:32 am (utc) on July 3, 2005]
In any case, that quote didn't come from me or from any other ODP editor. That was a SERP perp's (texasville) approach to the ODP -- "if [the ODP] doesn't serve MY purpose, [Google] shouldn't be allowed to use it for THEIR purposes." To me, that seems beyond arrogant and into megalomaniacal greed. But you can find lots of SERP perps saying the same thing this season -- it's the hive mind of the SEO community, I guess.
Internally, the editors are always discussing the best way to apply the ODP principles in future editing work, and what past work most badly needs to be brought up to current standards. But in those discussions, the total number of links is never an issue, because that's not a useful measure of anything we're interested in. For a doorway spammer, one link is too many. For a major internet archive, a thousand is too few. So it's idiotic and inane to throw link count numbers around as if they mattered -- those sites aren't you or your competition anyway, nor or they in any way comparable.
That is not a choice I have. The ODP was, from the beginning, licensed all over the internet. The only choice I have is, whether to contribute MY effort to it in those circumstances.
But in fact, for me that was an attraction and a challenge -- to give away useful information freely; for anyone to use as they see fit; without trying to control how they use it. That's an extremely important part of the whole concept: to inform, not to command; to contribute, not to control.
Changing that would disband the ODP community -- well, sabotage might be your intent, so that might not dissuade you. But the point is, editors know it. So even if that is your intent, you need to come up with some more subtle approach.
Texasville, you really need to get over your obsession about wanting DMOZ to be what you want it to be....
Counting backlinks will not lead to comprehension, because it is not something that anyone ever asks.
In your vision of the ODP, there is a cabal of editors hunched over a dimly-lit table. "This website -- cool, but garish. fifty links?" "No, it's not that bad, give it two hundred." "Compromise, one hundred and thirty two?"
It's not that way at all.
It's more like, "how good does a deeplink have to be, TODAY, to be listed in a Arts/Widget category? (The rules are, of course, different for recipe sites and for SERP perps, for obvious reasons.) And on the other side "how bad does a site have to be, to have all its deeplinks systematically rechecked? how bad just to have its links rechecked as people are in the neighborhood?"
Just throwing around random numbers -- means nothing.
Site organization matters. (A better-organized site is more likely to get more deeplinks. A lot of stupid SERP perps deliberately break site navigation to try to get more deeplinks -- another example of the ODP myths that abound in rotten ground.)
Site depth matters. A site with ten detailed articles on widely various subjects is more likely to be deeplinked than a site with a thousand one-paragraphers. The Catholic Encyclopedia occupies a unique "sweet spot" among reference works -- it has more ODP links than any other now: and based on my general library knowledge, I know of no other comparably-sized reference book that ought to get that many listings (assuming it had been published online. (I'm not a Catholic, and do not admire the tone or perspective of that work.)
Date matters. Some sites were deeplinked four to six years ago that wouldn't be today -- those links will eventually go away, probably. But would pruning those sites be a better use of volunteer time than reviewing new sites? (Don't answer that. You don't get a vote. I don't get a vote, either, except on which _I_ do first. But every editor faces prioritization decisions like that, and the strength of the ODP approach is that -- we do NOT all decide the same way.)
You believe that? Really? The truth is that most editors haven't even heard of WebmasterWorld, so your discussion here has no effect on your site review at all. How could it?
>> I'm not at all trying to get you to be accountable to the webmaster. <<
So why do you want us to drop what we volunteered to do -- review sites -- and start spending time writing to webmasters to tell them why we will not list their unlistable sites? That sounds like you want every editor to "account" to the webmaster for every move that they make.
Like I said above, we already tried communicating with submitters, and it was pointless. After two years, and 25 000 threads, the experiment was cancelled. Mostly, the-forum-that-cannot-be-named simply attracted the most vocal of the SERP PERPs who just wanted to argue about their sites, or find out which bits of their spam had been detected and how. You know what? We didn't want to tell them.
I checked the editor notes for hundreds of requested sites, and looked at many of those sites too. Many were in areas that I have no editing permissions, so I, personally, could never add nor deny the site anyway. What did I find? Many were still "awaiting review", but of those that had already been denied, in all but one case I found the site was unlistable according to ODP guidelines (that is where I get my "99%" figure from), and the one or two editor errors that I found in all that were easily corrected (new editor had misunderstood the guidelines).
>> But I think public review would be a good thing. <<
The (now discontinued) site submission status forum over at some place was about the most public that the review process ever got. Browse the 25 000 threads. They are all archived. We will not be doing that again.
>> the fact they ignore abuse reports and don't do anything about them. <<
There is a whole "Report Problems" topic area on the-forum-that-cannot-be-named and hundreds of threads where people have flagged problem listings and editors have sorted the problem. All in public. So, you are wrong.
>> but linking to every article they ever published? <<
Yeah, that happened in the early days in order to get a category structure up. I remember the Internet of 1997. For some topics there were only a few websites available. I remember looking for a topic that today returns 100 million results, and back then Yahoo, Altavista, Northern Light, Hotbot, et al returned less than 30 results each. So, what did the early ODP get populated with to get it going - yes - deeplinks from those sites. When the category flourished, many of those early listings were then deleted, for some deeplinked sites. For other sites and ODP topic areas the deletion hasn't yet happened. For some areas, the sites are still very useful, and the most comprehensive resource, and will remain listed until someone deems that they are not. Then they will be removed. Sites like imdb would not be deeplinked if they were submitted as new sites today; but for now the listings remain. No-one said the ODP was finished. It constantly evolves.
>> you obviously are stomping it because I crticized the odp <<
You would be wrong if you thought that one editor can stop any site being listed. You would be wrong to think that all 10 000 editors could work out who you are and what your site is from your posts here. Umm, less than 50 editors have probably even seen your post here.
>> now you are dragging the Catholic encyclopedia into it... THAT IS NOT what it is about at all! <<
You brought up the subject of deeplinks. That site has the highest number of deeplinks in the ODP.
Some sites should have more listings. Some should have less. The numbers you are throwing around provide no guidance whatsoever as to which is which. So there cannot possibly be anything in the numbers that calls for any kind of response.
Explain this 10,000 links.
How many of them do not match the current ODP guidelines?
- OK then have it your way:
- Every site listed in the ODP is total garbage, that is what is said time and time again on all the forums. It must be true.
- All of the editors are charging for listings and making a fortune. Their advertisements of how much they charge are easy to find. They are everywhere.
- All of the lower editors have all their editing work deleted by higher-up meta editors who have managed to get more money from the sites they take bribes from. Yet, somehow they still stay in as editors, even though nothing they do ever sees the light of day.
- Any well known site has been deleted from the ODP unless they paid someone a lot of money.
That must be the truth. Someone who knows nothing said so. We are all corrupt. We only list rubbish.
Why, exactly, do you want your site added then?
Why don't the editors here just answer the questions texasville asks? It can't be that difficult?
And I never did get an answer to this one either,
One more thing, I stumbled on a DMOZ post today which said there were editors profiting from status checks, I found this hard to fathom and assume it was some kind of joke? I hope you can re-assure me on this.
The site starts of by saying
"For many site owners and businesses getting listed in the ODP is considered a very important part of marketing and visibility. There is a strong opinion that having a site listed in ODP increases the ranking in Google and other search engines. We do not express an opinion on that,
Yes but happy to make money from those that do.
Isn't it a bit er, unethical for editors to be making money off the back of the ODP?
I know that they do state that this site is not affiliated with the ODP but if the person who runs it IS an ODP editor that kind of does makes him/her affiliated with the ODP right?
And if they are happy to take money for providing these checks, doesn't that call into question what else they'd be willing to take money for?
From the site : This latter point can be critical, a site gets listed in ODP, but then the listing gets removed or changed, and this can adversely affect the traffic coming to the site
For SEO's maintaining multiple sites for multiple clients, we can produce custom reports for you to show your clients.
I know that this is something 'anyone can do' with the RDF dumps but...at the end of the day isn't this/these editor(s) catering for the needs of 'Serp Perps'?
Which is against everything so far read in this thread? Editors providing a service for SEO purposes?
Anyway I'm off again, just popped popped in for some help in another area.
