No response whatsoever from DMOZ

[thardwick]

I have one site listed in one category in DMOZ. Our website moved and I have submitted the new URL to DMOZ more times than I can count over the last year. I have never heard anything from them. I've filled out the contact forms on their website and even filed a couple of abuse reports. I have never been acknowledged! I'm so frustrated I can't stand it! :-)

[rrdega]

Have you tried going to their Resource-Zone Forum and inquirying? The forum seems to be monitored by many editors, and responses are fairly rapid, if not always satisfying...

[thardwick]

Thanks for the suggestion! I haven't tried that, but I'll do it right now.

[sdani]

I would not suggest you submitting your site on their <edit>resource zone site <edit>.
On the plus side, it gives you a status, on the negative side.. there are some over active editors who visit the site and who just like to add negative comments about your site.
In my case, the person who responded to my query on <edit>resource zone site <edit>.
, himself added his "opinion" which was completely negative and he is not at all related to my category or my field of business. When responding to my status, he just felt it was his duty to also evaluate my site.
Try contacting the resident editor via email .. if the resident editor does not respond, try to send an email to an editor who edits a category that is one level above your category.
There are few good DMOZ editors here on this webmasterworld discussion board, who can also give you status if you send them a sticky mail. (They volunteer for this on some discussions, who have to search and find their names..)

Honestly .. the editors on <edit>resource zone site <edit>.
cannot expedite your request.. all they can do is add negative comments.

[thardwick]

Yeah...I already posted and got a really sh*tty response from an editor. He claimed what I was doing was spamming and that I should have put a permanent redirect on my old site. Well, why don't they tell you that on their "update url" page! Anyway, how do I find out who the editor of my category is? Also, I notice that at the bottom of my category, there is a "volunteer to edit this category" link. Does that mean there is no editor? Thanks so much for the help!

[sdani]

I am not a dmoz expert .. i am just starting to learn about this directory about which I used to think very highly when I was just a user.
But .. I think if it says "volunteer".. then there is no editor listed. You can click on the category above your's, and you will find the editor listed at the same sopt where you see "volunteer" now. Usually more than one at that level.. so you have two people whom you can write (write to one and wait for a few weeks before you write to the other).

[rrdega]

Personally, I would just set the Redirect, and let Robozilla do its thing...

A couple of things I've seen with DMOZ:
* Being all Volumteer based, the category editors are quite often heavily burdened
* The editors seem to get beat up on, and abused a lot
* P***ing off a category editor in any way may make your requests *never* come into work, as there is no set sequence in which they process their queue. They can "pick 'n choose" as they like.

[victor]

Yeah...I already posted and got a really sh*tty response from an editor. He claimed what I was doing was spamming and that I should have put a permanent redirect on my old site. Well, why don't they tell you that on their "update url" page!

Well, I found this by clicking the extra help link on the update URL page:

Please only submit a URL to the Open Directory once. Again, multiple submissions of the same or related sites may result in the exclusion and/or deletion of those and all affiliated sites.

That pretty much covers what you say you were doing.

A permanent redirect when you change a website's domain name is a simple and obvious thing to do.

Without it, all the SERPS for you in Google would have 404ed for a month or more -- much longer for many other search engines. Also, any one who had bookmarked a page would have got a 404. You old URLs (whether the link in DMOZ or elsewhere) can persist for months and years. Not having a redirect is throwing away traffic.

You got given good advice as far as I can tell.

[windharp]

Well, why don't they tell you that on their "update url" page!

Because it is obvious, at least I was thinking that until today. Assume that site A exists, is listed in the ODP and is still working. No sign that this is abandoned or will be.

We receive an update request to change A to B. How the hell should we be able to find out if it is not a trick by someone else to steal the link? Someone who was "clever" enough to make a copy of the whole site A and put it on domain B? Someone who will change the whole thing ASAP when we made the change?

Of course we could compare whois Data, write emails and so on. But if you think about it, you will realize that there is no reasson for us to invest such a huge amount of work. A is still working. From the users point of view, there is no need to switch to B. So there is no need for us to do so, we can spend our energie on other things like adding additional links.

[sdani]

windharp

Then change the very first reasons mentioned on this link to use the "update URL" form.

[editors.dmoz.org...]

The very reason mentioned for this form is :
""Replace an old URL with a new URL when it has changed."".

[windharp]

Of course that is a reason for an update URL request, I didn't say it isn't. If the old site is down, its no problem. If it is still up - of course we need some proof that the request is valid. I didn't say it is not possible, so there is no reason to change the text.

[thardwick]

windharp...it's real simple. When you click to my site A, there's a message that says "our site has moved to B". Click here to go to our new site.

[LizardGroupie]

DMOZ editors have built the best directory by concentrating on making the directory useful for the user, NOT for the webmaster or site owner.

I don't understand why people can't comprehend this. DMOZ is not there to help out websites. Nobody owes anyone a response.

[thardwick]

Gee, Lizard...if they didn't help out the webmasters, how would the users EVER benefit?

[hutcheson]

The DMOZ response is, in effect, always the same. 90% of all listable submitted sites are already listed, and we're working on the other 10%.

How do I get that?

Over 3.8 million listings, under 700,000 submittals waiting to be reviewed in public categories, and over 50% of _those_ (based on a rather large sample) are one flavor or another of spam.

Do the math.

Now, commercial webmasters see another side of this. The average wait for a listing is, lessee, say 6 months for 50% of them, infinity for the other 50% (i.e. they aren't going to be listed), that makes it infinity+6months/2, which equals infinity. If we could reduce the average wait for listings to 5 minutes, the average wait perceived by webmasters would be infinity+5minutes/2, which also equals infinity. In other words, you'll all be sharing ice floes with imps in hell long before you're happy with that. We can do the math too, so ... how much are we going to worry about webmasters being unhappy? Just as much as we worry about fire being hot, and burning sulfur acrid.

[tombola]

how much are we going to worry about webmasters being unhappy? Just as much as we worry about fire being hot

If you don't care about webmasters, why do you post on this forum?
This is *WebmasterWorld*, not *UserWorld*.

[heini]

It's certainly true that a permanent redirect might have been a strategy. Since in this case the old site has the text equivalent for a permanent redirect on the frontpage I don't see where the problem for the editors is.
It's fairly obvious the site has moved to a new address, no need at all to do any extra work like whois lookups etc.
The request to change the url is actually helpful for the quality of the directory, and ultimatively for the user.

I would have to agree: this is exactly what the "Replace an old URL with a new URL when it has changed." process is made for?

[hutcheson]

Unhappy, I don't mind.

Unnecessarily unhappy, or ignorantly unhappy, I mind.

>I would have to agree: this is exactly what the "Replace an old URL with a new URL when it has changed." process is made for?

Also agree. The problem is twofold. (1) Some ODP licensees don't show the "Update URL" link, so people use the "suggest URL" because they don't see the other (or don't know any better.) (2) The current ODP editors' user interface mixes "Update URL" requests (which many editors including me would be willing to review quickly for the sake of quality control) with "Add URL" requests (which are very backlogged in places.) Editors have requested changes in this process; we don't yet have a replacement design or a commitment to implement.

So we currently don't have a good solution for this; which makes the 301 trick allowing Robozilla to give "update URL" requests a very high priority, so valuable.

[heini]

>The current ODP editors' user interface mixes "Update URL" requests (...) with "Add URL" requests

OUCH. Sounds like a major flaw in the system.

[John_Caius]

Well it's true that they're both in the same list, but update URL requests have a special tag that makes them clearly stand out.

[hutcheson]

I wouldn't call it a "major flaw". Improving it would certainly (in editors' eyes) rank way below improving handling of duplicate submittals. But I am certainly one of those editors who would want to use enhancements in this area to provide quicker turnaround for update requests.

[thardwick]

hutcheson,

Thanks so much for all your help! I'm looking into having my old site point to the new site automatically. I've contacted the people who host my new site and they say they can very simply have the old one point to the new one. I asked about a "301 redirect" and the contact I have isn't sure what the exact code is, but he said it will work like this ~~> "www.keyword-keyword.net points to www.keywordkeyword.net". Of course, their "real" site is www.keywordkeyword.net. Would this type of redirect work with the open directory robots?

[edited by: heini at 8:38 pm (utc) on Sep. 4, 2003]
[edit reason] no urls per TOS, please. Thanks [/edit]

[hutcheson]

If you do that, either the current URL will continue to work seamlessly until the editor notices your update request; OR the current URL will work but our spider will trigger it to be updated more quickly. Exactly what will happens depends on those details your contact person didn't know.

[heini]

Thardwick, there are countless discussions on 301s here. I'd do a search, and then stick the info under your host's nose. They really really should know such things. It's basic server tech knowledge.

[thardwick]

I've checked with the hosting company and they say this is what they'll do to redirect the traffic:

ServerAlias keyword-keyword.net keywordkeyword.net www.keyword-keyword.net www.keywordkeyword.net

Will this work? What will it do to the (dmoz) robots?

[hutcheson]

I think (but am not sure) an editor will be able to verify, from that information; but the search engine spider won't detect it. What they need to be doing is (assuming you're using Apache, as I think you implied) "Redirect permanent".