Forum Moderators: open
anyways, can i do anything do make my site a "featured site" on DMOZ?
Welcome to Webmasterworld! :)
Ugh...Powdork, thanks for understanding the pressure I'm under. :)
[edited by: martinibuster at 5:48 am (utc) on Sep. 8, 2003]
1) Make sure it's not a commercial site or in a commercial category. Selecting one business as "cool" is almost always an abusive act, and Darwinian selection acts to inhibit editors doing that.
2) Make sure that your site not only covers the whole breadth of kinds of content that would be listed in that category, and that it contains order of magnitude more content of all kinds than any other site in that category.
In one of my categories, (call it "nature poems"), I'd list a site with as few as 3 or 4 poems. But the "cool" site has over 3000! PLUS multimedia. PLUS multiple indexes. PLUS information on poets...and a few other things nobody else has. I estimate it took him about 6 years, spending an hour or so a day -- every day -- to get that.
If you pick on a more specific category (say, "Robert Burns"), you probably could get a cool designation with merely three or four e-texts: his complete poems, a book-length biography, a critical essay or three, and some interesting sidebar content (maps, pictures, music, etc.)
Far less than 1% of sites are ever cooled. If you don't think you can find enough quality content to put your site in the top one-tenth of 1% in its top-level category, then what you want probably isn't doable.
although i guess another question i might have is... do editors usually rereview sites? for example, if the editor decided to list my site, but decided it wasn't a cool site, when i submitted it, what are the odds that they will look at it again, and reconsider? is there anything i could do that would encourage them to look at it, again?
is there anything i could do that would encourage them to look at it, again?You could ask for a review three times in a week using a different thread each time over at the public forum (see charter). This will most likely get you a review, but not of the type you're looking for.;)
p.s. I f you didn't catch the sarcasm, this is not good advice.
Yes, it is possible that a site be "cooled" after it's added.
Yes, editors are reviewing sites. That doesn't mean they look at every page! And it doesn't mean they count pages.
"Cooling" is a highly judgmental action, and editors have different approaches to cooling. _I_ have "my" categories (that is, ones that I know fairly well, because I added most of the sites there) but as an editall I work across a broad range of categories. I will cool sites in "my" categories, but hardly ever in other categories--I don't know the alternatives enough. Some editors basically don't cool sites (except under certain specific objective criteria).
I should caution you that simply weighing the bits is not remotely related to the kind of judgment cooling requires. Quite often we see sites with two or three pages of information spread out over several hundred HTML pages. (There are apparently some "schools" of SEO thought--one would rather call them "gangs"--that think this is the essence of good spider bait. We think it is the depth of uncoolishness!
A site with 50 pages of information packed into 40 clear, navigable HTML pages is worth MUCH more than a site with 100 pages of information spread out over 1000 pages. I designed one site intending to publish about 10,000 pages -- so that every page could be reached from every other page in four clicks by four different routes. (And I've spent a great deal of time wondering whether I could get that down to three clicks.) Not every cool site has -- or can have -- that kind of accessibility, but not making a serious effort to provide that is fatally uncool.
For the record--we don't know of any search engine that gives an extra boost to cool sites. So if you're sweating for an artificial Googleboost, this is not the approach. Designing a site to be "cool" because you think people will find it more useful ... is cool: people will notice, and Google will notice that people noticed.
And the site appears as "cooled" only if people use dmoz.org, and not one of the many mirrors of the ODP like the Google Directory. I doubt there are that many direct ODP users that if your site is cooled this will bring in significantly more traffic. In fact, there is a rumor that the site cooling feature was invented by metas to get dishonest editors who can't resist cooling their own site to expose themselves. ;)
1) The "cool site" information is in the RDF. Some licensees have used it (in the same way dmoz.org does) to show it as the first link on their directory page. (But nobody gives extra link popularity to that link.)
2) No, that's not what cool was invented for. And it predates the first anointment of metas. Just beause that shoe has roach ichor all over its sole doesn't mean that was its sole's sole purpose!
I.e. webguest and i-une (search in Google, as I don't know if the TOS here allow to post their URLs).
Could be currently, but I can see cool sites getting boosts from search engines like Google, in their future algos. For example, a cool site, besides its normal boost in PR from DMOZ listing, could also get a PR boost from being considered it to be (virtually) linked from the profile page of the editor who cooled it.
Even if they could: Mr Edito-For-Three-Year (with a load of experience and a good judgement for quality) has cooled tons of sites while Mr Just-Started-To-Be-Editor cooled only one site. According to googles current PR system, the last link would be given more points. Would not make sense to me.
True, there would be problems like this. Some proxy numbers could be used by using info about all the editors in that category and editors in its parent categories and so on. Or in a simplified algo, it could give, say, 50% more weight to the cooled site.
On the side of the equation, DMOZ could create a new category - a category consisting of only cooled sites in hierarchy similar to that of the rest of the directory, still containing the cooled sites, to boost the PR of cooled sites. (That is, cooled sites will have 2 listings - one regular and one in the cooled sites directory.) While boosting PR is not the objective of DMOZ, this structure might help users, web designers and webmasters too - since they can get ideas about what are the good sites and have some good time navigating through that category.
