Forum Moderators: phranque
Donny
Having said that, it doesn't take long to submit a link request so it's worth repeating once a month until you succeed.
Kaled.
it's worth repeating once a month until you succeed.
Repeat once a month, and it may take as few as four months to be banned as an ODP spammer. That may take down all sites you are associated with, whether already listed or not.
That may explain some people's apparent long waits for listing.
It is not an "application" and it doesn't get "processed". That is not what editors do, and maybe that explains the frustration that many feel after submitting a "suggestion".
What happens is that spread across the 650 000 categories there are 8000 editors who, on a completely random basis, choose "something" to do in their freetime.
The intention is to build a category and they will use sites they find in search engine listings, in magazines, on storefronts, and maybe from the submitted "suggestion" pile if something catches their eye.
No-one can tell who will work on which category, when that will happen, or exactly what they will do. All that we know is that many thousands of sites are added across the directory every single week.
So, you submit the base URL for the site, just the once, and you submit it to the one best category, and then leave it at that. That's the best you can do - anything else is either wasting your time, or the editors.
Repeat once a month, and it may take as few as four months to be banned as an ODP spammer.
If they don't want repeat requests then they need to provide feedback. Just how often do you think requests can be repeated? Every three months, every year, absolutely never?
There was a time, not so long ago, when an error message was returned when you submitted a request. However, the requests must have gotten through because I was listed after giving up.
Without any feedback, i.e. information on the queue being processed, etc. there is no way to know if your request has been lost/forgotten. In addition, you don't get an email saying ACCEPTED/REJECTED.
Kaled.
When you submit a suggested URL, you see a page that says "You submission has been accepted".
That's feedback.
There is no need for feedback. The submittal policy already states what happens and what you should do. I'll expand on it here. Take it as a definitive guide, condensed from the last hundred, or more, times that I have seen this explained.
When you suggest a site it goes into a pile; one pile for each category. The suggestion stays there forever until some action is performed by an editor - so you do not need to resubmit.
If you submit the same URL to the same category again, it overwrites the old suggestion. Any editor sorting by date will see your suggestion as being new - so if they are looking to work on older suggestions then you have just penalised yourself.
If the submit a different URL to the same category, or any URL from the same site to a different category, then you'll soon be flagged up as a spammer.
So, there are two very good reasons to heed the "submit once to the one best category" warning that is oft repeated.
>> Without any feedback, i.e. information on the queue being processed, etc. there is no way to know if your request has been lost/forgotten. <<
The queue is not "processed". See my earlier post just before yours. Note that a suggestion is rarely lost. To mitigate against that, you may submit just one more time (making a total of two times in total) only if you see no action after about a year.
The ODP has no concept of "forgotten". The system remembers every suggestion that was ever made. There are countless suggestions in countless categories. At the random point in time, that some random editor, decides to work on the random category that you suggested to, then your suggestion may be used to build that category.
If the suggestion was made to the wrong category then maybe it will be moved to the correct category, and re-await someone to review it there.
If the suggestion was unwanted, then it will be deleted: in this case we never ever give feedback, as having deleted the suggestion once we do not wish to see it resubmitted again, any time soon (read: never).
If you do not see your site listed within a year, then no ODP editor would deem it unreasonable to resubmit the same URL to the same category just in case your site was one of the 0.01% that suffers an accident.
We tried giving feedback. The experiment was performed for over 2 years, and over 10 000 sites were given a status in that time. Most of the time all that could be said was "suggestion received: someone will get to it eventually".
After two years of that, it was found that the service was only useful to spammers trying to find out what spam we had detected and what we had missed. The time spent on status checks was not worth it: in all that time less than a dozen "lost" submissions were corrected.
The service will not be returning anytime soon.
Your best bet, it to become an editor for this category, spend a few hours a week contributing to this category, and eventually add your own listing after a few months, but with no preferential treatment and no promotional languate.
In other words, follow the DMOZ rules, and you will have no problem adding your own site as a new DMOZ editor.
Yet another myth. Many leaf categories are actively tended by the editor named in the category directly above.
Additionally there are hundreds of editors that can, and do, edit anywhere and everywhere. In fact the major directory growth is achieved by the random edits made by that group of editors. They are also the ones that are more likely to catch the major patterns of spam and clean it up.
Its a webdirectory that will help your site get crawled, but it will not give you that boost in the serp you wish for.
/Ove
If the submit a different URL to the same category, or any URL from the same site to a different category, then you'll soon be flagged up as a spammer.
Repeat once a month, and it may take as few as four months to be banned as an ODP spammer. That may take down all sites you are associated with, whether already listed or not.
It's good to know that you can get someone kicked out out of DMOZ by repeatedly submitting urls on their behalf.
At the random point in time, that some random editor, decides to work on the random category that you suggested to, then your suggestion may be used to build that category.
Random this, random that.... sounds like anarchy to me. I prefer order and organisation. In particular, I can see no earthly reason why processing of requests/suggestions should not be ordered (per category).
The ODP has no concept of "forgotten". The system remembers every suggestion that was ever made.
Technically, this may be true but you are surely not suggesting that rejections are routinely reprocessed? If they are never reprocessed they may as well be deleted.
Kaled.
I can see that this needs a lot of expansion.
It would be fine for a random surfer to submit web sites for IBM and DELL into the computer manufacturers category. They both do make computers and they are separate, multi-national companies.
It would not be fine for you to have "Joes Apple Mac Repair Shop" and "Joes PC-compatible Repair Shop" web sites and try to submit both to the ODP. We would treat them collectively as being one site, and that one entity would get only one listing. We would look for the "root page" for Joes site and list just that.
We treat a collection of pages, folders, subdomains, and domains that belong to one entity as being one site, and that whole one site is allowed one whole suggestion to the ODP. Editors may well deeplink the site if they recognise it as being authorative; but it is not for the submitter to suggest multiple pages or domains.
>> Couldn't two sites be very different from each other and still belong in the same category? <<
If you have a computer repair shop and a flower stall, then those are so unrelated that both may qualify for listing, however, if it appears that one or more of them is designed purely for "adsense clicks", has no real "authorative" content, and there appears to be no real business behind the website, then deletion of suggestion may well be the outcome.
It would be very rare for a person to have two sites that qualify for separate listings in the same or related categories.
If you have two sites that are related, surely you would want every surfer to visit both? That being the case, you would want to link them together; and having linked them together we would want to list the one best starting point for the visitor.
No. It is the best way to grow the directory. No one is forced to do one particular thing. There is no OverLord editor dishing instructions out as to who does what, or when. Each person grows the part of the directory that they feel like contributing their time towards, as and when they feel like doing so.
>> I prefer order and organisation. <<
Then the ODP is not for you. The category structure, and the contents of each category, are very highly organised; but the decision as to who does what work, where, and when, is left to each individual to decide. That, so far, has grown the largest directory on the net to date. The model is working just fine.
>> In particular, I can see no earthly reason why processing of requests/suggestions should not be ordered (per category). <<
That would make it easy for a spammer to deny all his competitors a chance of a listing by bunging up the queue with hundreds of junk submissions, that have to be reviewed first before we can get to the stuff in the queue that is obviously listable.
It would also mean that if it were known that the queue in a particular category is 3 months long, then we would get a whole load of people submitting their content-less domain now, to "book a spot" and then write the content in two months time, just in time to be reviewed. Since the ODP is not a listing service for webmasters; nor a submission processing collective, what you are suggesting the ODP to do, will never happen.
>> >> The ODP has no concept of "forgotten". The system remembers every suggestion that was ever made. << <<
>> Technically, this may be true but you are surely not suggesting that rejections are routinely reprocessed? If they are never reprocessed they may as well be deleted. <<
You should note that if a site really is good, that an editor may well come across it and add it independantly of any submission that was made. Often editors are adding sites that have never been submitted at all, so even if a submission is "lost", that doesn't bar the site from being added some other way.
Editors do have to ask whether rechecking 1000 sites that we thought we didn't want to list, in case we accidentally deleted 2 or 3 that we meant to keep, is time better spent than reviewing 1000 sites (whether submitted sites, or sites found "elsewhere" isn't stated) that we have never reviewed before and seeing what of those could be useful. In every case, you'll have to agree that the latter option wins by a very large margin every time.
In a raging torrent of used suds being channeled down the spam drain, there will always be a couple of unintended casualties: humans are prone to make occasional mistakes, but such a mistake can be rectified by any editor at any time once it has been noticed. The problem with the now defunct status-checking forum was that there was a whole chorus of people claiming such mistakes, and only 3 or 4 per thousand were actually genuine in their claim.
It's good to know that you can get someone kicked out out of DMOZ by repeatedly submitting urls on their behalf.
That is not the case.
I may have misunderstood what you meant here, the first time that I read it. So add this to the answer I posted above:
Rejections are generally not reprocessed. Deleted stuff is deleted forever, but the submission and deletion are all logged, by category, by editor, and other ways too. Site suggestions remain in unreviewed until listed or deleted. All actions are logged, so after deletion the actions are still able to be reviewed.
All prior work on a domain can be seen each time any URL is re-entered into the system, or is edited, and everything can be accessed through the logs too. So, if something is accidentally deleted, then there is still a chance that someone will notice that fact and correct it.
The logs also allow the rebuilding of categories when a new editor with malicious intentions decides to mess about with existing listings. Said editor can be booted and the category restored to how it was. It does happen from time to time, but there are plenty of things already put in place to help spot it and then deal with it.
Even more importantly we want to give zero clues to the spammers as to which has been detected and already deleted, and which has been missed and might eventually make it as far as an editor's eyeballs, and which has been seen by an editor and already been rejected.
Spammers usually give themselves away, by, umm, spamming us. They often help us to pinpoint their rotten schemes more efficiently simply by submitting them multiple times. They will not be getting any feedback, now, or anytime soon (read: never).
The other point that you seem to have missed, made right back at the beginning of this thread, is that the ODP is not a listing service for webmasters, and it does not "process" submissions. Suggestions remain in the unreviewed queue forever until they are either listed or deleted.
What happens, is that spread across the 650 000 categories there are 8000 editors who, on a completely random basis, choose "something" to do in their freetime.
The intention is to build a category and they will use sites they find in search engine listings, in magazines, on storefronts, and maybe from the submitted "suggestion" pile if something catches their eye.
No-one can tell who will work on which category, when that will happen, or exactly what they will do. All that we know is that many thousands of sites are added across the directory every single week.
So, you submit the base URL for the site, just the once, and you submit it to the one best category, and then leave it at that. That's the best you can do - anything else is either wasting your time, or the editors.
If it is listable, then eventually one day it will likely be listed. There is nothing more you can do once you have submitted.
If it isn't listable, then we do not want it to be resubmitted, and we don't want to tell you how to make it barely listable. People submit multiple built-for-adsense scraper sites and somehow think we are looking to list that sort of junk? We aren't.
We are looking for quality sites to list. You've either got one or you haven't. If you haven't then don't submit. At all. (But too many do).
How many spammers drop unwanted links into the forums here every day?
I would guess at, probably dozens.
How many such posts do you actually see live in the forum?
Very, very, few, and then only for a few minutes before deletion. The moderators are very efficient are removing such stuff.
Do you think they send feedback to each one saying "Dear Spammer, we had to remove your blatent link drop to your diet pills and viagra site. Perhaps if you did this or that instead, we might miss your spam and let it remain in the forum."?
Do you?
Well?
If not, then why are you expecting the same sort of feedback from the ODP, on the stuff that they don't want to list on their website?
.
This classic WebmasterWorld thread [webmasterworld.com] mirrors many internal editor discussions held in ODP private forums.
could be compared to tell a spammer how to cheat the approval system?
I have implemented such system in one directory of mine with great success. May be the size of the directory is involved.
Anything else is leaking valid information to potential spammers.
"pending/under review" you can pretty much work out yourself from the ODP guidelines....If it's been suggested and meets the guidelines, it'll be pending until accepted.
Ditto "rejected/deleted" -- if it doesn't meet the guidelines it'll be one of these after review.
From the anarchic description of the way it works, it is entirely possible that another editor will accept what has been rejected. It is also possible that a program might be rejected by one editor if it competes with one of their own products. There are many stories of this sort of thing happening.
Kaled.
might be rejected by one editor if it competes with one of their own products.
are you saying that possibly the ODP could have editors working categories that they have a commercial interest in?
I say there is no way the ethically robust folks at the ODP would ever allow this.
What conceivable motive have you got for re-submitting? What thought process went through your head that told you "submit again" was the best solution?
Suggestions stay in Unreviewed forever, until either accepted or deleted.
If it hasn't been reviewed yet, then you just overwrote your suggestion with a newer date - an editor that does decide to look at "old" suggestions first would therefore miss yours as being old. It would be flagged as being "new".
If it has been reviewed, rejected, and deleted, then without changing any content on your site, we do not want you to resubmit it again. If you do decide to just keep on resubmitting, then after several submissions, you're in danger of looking very much like a spammer: 'cus that's exactly what spammers do - send us multiple copies of stuff that we do not want.
If a year passes without anything happening, then no editor would begrudge a second submission just in case your site was one of the "one in ten thousand" that was accidentally misplaced. Submitting monthly is sheer insanity. It could never achieve anything positive for your site.
If you suspect that you were rejected, and after at least six months has passed and you have massively improved your site content, then a second submission would also be OK in most cases.
[edited by: g1smd at 10:41 pm (utc) on Sep. 12, 2005]
