Penalty For Not Getting Listed in DMOZ

Am I now banned

[TheGuyAboveYou]

Hi

I submitted a site a year ago that was not accepted to DMOZ. It does not show up at all in the G SERPs. So I was wondering:

Do the DMOZ editors put you in some type of
"do not include" list if they don't like your site.
I could see how this could also help Google if the
editors did this.

Since some of you are editors I thought someone
might know.

[skibum]

The ODP editors have no power over what Google does or doesn't do with a website.

[larryhatch]

As best as I can tell, there is nothing like a "do not include" list.
Your aren't actively excluded, you just aren't INcluded and I don't call that a "penalty" either.
It may feel like a penalty, but its just a lack of inclusion for whatever reasons. -Larry

[hutcheson]

The ODP doesn't provide a list of "rejected" sites. And it would be impossible to provide one -- we simply don't collect, let alone retain, that kind of information. (In fact, it would be just as hard as building a list of "accepted" sites -- except the list would be much larger and much much less useful, so you'd have trouble getting volunteers to build it.)

So it's pretty safe to assume that Google doesn't take ODP rejections into account, and never will.

[g1smd]

It is always possible that an ODP editor submitted a spam report to Google if your site engages in blatently spammy practices -- but then again any of your competitors, or even just some very annoyed random surfer, could also do that at any time too.

[TheGuyAboveYou]

Thanks...

I was a little paranoid about this.

[victor]

With Google, you never know what they are doing, so going a little paranoid is understandable. Whereas the ODP has a ton of published guides and guidelines, and well-publicised (but banned from mention on WMW) places you can report suspected problems.

Being, like many people, a little paranoid about Google, I wouldn't put it past them to have given an intern or new hire the job of writing a system to compare successive ODP RDF dumps. And then analysing the SERPS for sites that were newly added or newly deleted from DMOZ.

It is possible that such an exercise would be an early warning sign for all sorts of SERP-related issues; and may be one of the "100 factors" used by Google to determine SERPs placement.

So sites recently removed from DMOZ may trigger some sort of Google activity.

Then again, maybe not. Perhaps they did such an exercise, and found the results to be not usable. We'll never know, unless the shareholders among us ask at the next Company meeting.

Or some of us run some RDF deltas and see if there is anything useful there.

[rfgdxm1]

>Whereas the ODP has a ton of published guides and guidelines, and well-publicised (but banned from mention on WebmasterWorld) places you can report suspected problems.

There is a "report abuse/spam" link on every dmoz.org category page. This should be publicly visible enough for anyone who wants to report abuse to do so.