Forum Moderators: phranque
Submitter has 50 built-for-adsense spam sites to submit. Starts off by submitting three of them, each with some different way of trying to disguise the relationship and intent of the sites. We immediately tell him that site #1 and #3 have been rejected as spam. Submitter knows that we may have missed spam method #2 as being spam, and uses that method for the remainder of the 50 sites to be submitted.
That's why we do not give status on any pending or deleted sites(*).
The only status report we are prepared to give, is that shown by browsing the public side of dmoz.org - where all the listed sites, are, ummm, listed.
Anything else is: submit once to the one best category, and walk away.
(*) Occasionally (very very occasionally) an editor may find a site that they really want to list, but there is some technical problem that ought to be fixed first, and they will drop a note to the owner about it [I did this once: a site had been moved to a new domain, and none of the images were working - I dropped the owner a line as a "concerned surfer" without even mentioning the ODP . The site was fixed within a few weeks, and I listed it next time that I visited and found it to be working].
[edited by: g1smd at 10:36 pm (utc) on Sep. 12, 2005]
I have 5 sites and I would guess that most webmasters have more than one website. How can the ODP automatically declare that these sites are crap? So basically they have stereotyped a lot of webmasters as spammers. I am not a spammer nor do I ever intend to be. I am an honest webmaster just trying to make a living doing something I love. I have come to the conclusion that I do not need the ODP to pick up my site in order to boost my traffic. If they stereotype me then that is their problem and they just lost out on adding a great site to their directory. Honestly how relevant are they anymore? It feels more like a club than an informational directory. The editor that was talking basically said that if your site didn't fit his little box of what a website should be then he wouldn't even consider adding you to the directory. Thoughts?
That said, if one person builds five sites for five of his own "businesses" then it is likely that they are just building sites for ODP submission, for PR, and for adsense. And, in most cases we will find very little content, no unique content, and nothing really worth listing. I have seen that many times, and there are editors who have edited 100 times as many sites as me, that have probably seen that effect hundreds of times too.
If you own a real shop, made out of real bricks, in a real street, and have a real staff, and you then expand onto the internet to simply advertise your business, or even start taking orders over the net, then you'll likely get listed.
If, when sat at home one day you decide to start up a dozen mail-order businesses which you will run from home with only a web presence: say jewellery, gifts, cards, posters, diet pills, herbals, dating, horoscopes, condoms, pregnancy testing kits, alcohol/drug testing kits, radar detectors, etc, and you put a dozen sites online, one for each subject, then those most likely are not sites that we will want to list, for many many reasons.
Submitter knows that we may have missed spam method #2 as being spam, and uses that method for the remainder of the 50 sites to be submitted.
well if site #2 was approved then in fact the site wasn't spam and the editor obviously saw useful content on the site. All this tells the "spammer" is that he needs to make all his other sites the same quality as #2 because #1 & #3 didn't cut it.
Whats wrong with that? Seems like everybody wins, the spammer learns that quality wins, and the ODP gets better quality sites submitted.
Submitter knows that we may have missed spam method #2 as being spam, and uses that method for the remainder of the 50 sites to be submitted.
well if site #2 was approved then in fact the site wasn't spam and the editor obviously saw useful content on the site. All this tells the "spammer" is that he needs to make all his other sites the same quality as #2 because #1 & #3 didn't cut it.
Whats wrong with that? Seems like everybody wins, the spammer learns that quality wins, and the ODP gets better quality sites submitted.
I didn't say #2 was approved. I did not say that at all. I said that #1 and #3 hadn't made it past the spam filters. #2 hadn't been filtered out as spam, nor had it been approved.
Newbie editors do sometimes list sites that should not have been listed. Experience gives greater knowledge, and I have revisited a category and deleted a listed site after spotting a much wider catalogue of deception, many many months later.
