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I'm a webdesigner hobbyist, I guess there is one in every family :-)
I have developed a site for a family member's business. This site is doing pretty well in Google for specific keywords and gives proper inforation on the products of this site. It is a "professional" site in the sense that there are no google-ads or anything like that. I designed it primarily to score well in the search engines.
Now the problem is that I submitted the site to DMOZ about a year and a half ago. The site still isn't listed. In fact only 1 site of all my 6 sites got listed after submitting.
Is there a way to be more successfull with DMOZ?
Looks to me like these guys have a lot of power but use it rather randomly.
Any ideas on this?
Thanks in advance!
v.
The site still isn't listed.
Join the club. This is nothing unusual. Quite often, DMOZ taks a long time. Yes - years! There's so much spam and nonsense for the editors to go through.
Search for "resource zone" to get some info about your submissions. There's some strict rules at this forum and they're not really friendly but you CAN find out if you're awaiting review or already rejected.
Yes there is.
Just design your sites so that they are useful for visitors, and not primarily for the search engines.
Looks to me like these guys have a lot of power but use it rather randomly.
I want to reframe that comment.
These guys volunteer a lot of hours to build a directory. They use those hours to work in the areas they are interested in, and can be most effective in. That's the way volunterr projects work.
You have volunteeed about five minutes of your time to raise a random quality issue about the directory: i.e. your unnamed sites.
Your status as a volunteer critic is not, in this instance, of much use to the volunteer editors as you have not named the sites.
But naming the sites is not permitted under WMW's TOS, so the time you've volunteered looks wasted.
There are better ways to help with the ODP.
I resent your respons as I have volunteered to be part of the DMOZ project, but I have been rejected... twice!
No particular reason has been given (just a standard mail)
looks to me like (some of) those guys are getting of on all 'the power' they have, and they don't want to share it with anybody
Not sure you can do so on this site (as TOS forbid republishing of emails), but why not find somewhere where you can republish your application, so any of us can comment on why if should have been accepted or rejected?
If it made it in then forget about it - you'll either make it in, according to the cat editor's whims, or not
DMOZ isn't there to be useful to the web, its there to be an internal collection point that suits the editors who arbitrarily make it in.
This is junkyard nonsense IMO. It is easy to criticize from the sidelines. Jump in, edit, give up your valuable time, don't ask a cent, and compromise your schedule and so on. Then ask yourself if what you have done is "useful to the web".
As well, if you really want to speed things up, I respectfully suggest applying the following to each submission. Read the instructions, apply them and be patient. After all volunteerism is free. Whimsy is something I don’t have time for.
I've been an editor for a year and have built up a nice record of edits, and cleaned up my small category very nicely. I've applied to other categories (small, niche, non-commercial) and been rejected frequently.
It's hard to sit back and say "they have so many sites to go through" when they turn down so many editors. Whether it's an elitist attitude, corruption, or sheer stupidity, DMOZ has become somewhat of a joke over the past year.
Only 1 out of 6 is listed
Congrats!
It's hard to sit back and say "they have so many sites to go through" when they turn down so many editors
Yes. Applied for a category that was last updated a year back. Denied due to a lack of experience as an editor.
If that was really the reason for the rejection (which may or may not be accurate), then he probably applied for a category that was too large for an new editor. In such a case, just apply for a smaller subcategory instead, and your chances of getting accepted will increase dramatically.
[#*$!...]
Anyway, there is another thing I learned about: beeing in editor's position one can understand why certain sites are not aproved or takes too much to be reviewed.
My advice to anyone who would want to post in the category I'm editting is to review the DMOZ' rules because that's where the most webmasters fails. Think that reviewing one site is taking 5 minutes or more and I'd be more than happy to see sites with good titles, in the proper categories, good informational content and without broken links so I can approve them in a minute. I'm also pleased seeing one mistake on a site so I can delete it because this will decrease the number of sites I have to review. Have you think of that? I did not until I became one of them.
Would someone help me down from here?
;)
Take the advice of others in this thread... Submit and Forget. If you've followed the submission guidelines exactly, your chances of having a site accepted are far greater than if you just submitted without reviewing the guidelines.
My competitors get in, which gives them an unfair advantage.
How is that an unfair advantage? What about the links you have elsewhere that your competitors don't have. Would that also be considered unfair advantage?
You mention PR9. Does the category you are submitting to have a PR9? How many other sites are listed in that category? I believe PageRank is going through a total makeover these days. It is not what it used to be. ;)
I consider this a completely different thing.
DMOZ should be an OPEN directory, but clearly it's not. My sites all conform to their policies, but still I don't get listed.
Figuring out why an editor will see this statement as intrinsically self-contradictory is left as an exercise to the reader.
Applied for a category that was last updated a year back. Denied due to a lack of experience as an editor.
bird says
If that was really the reason for the rejection (which may or may not be accurate), then he probably applied for a category that was too large for an new editor
So, they are better off leaving a LARGE category not updated for a year, but not have any newbie editor get in? Newbie only as a dmoz editor, not in the category subject. BTW, that large category only has 39 sites, with no sub-cats.
