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Yes, with a couple of exceptions. A business or organization with an offline, brick-and-mortar presence may have two listings, one in the town where it is located and one in the main category it belongs in. A website that is multilingual may have an additional listing in each language it offers information in. A website with child-appropriate non-commercial content may have an additional listing in the Kids and Teens directory. And occasionally a content-rich informational site, like the BBC or the Smithsonian, will be given multiple listings.
If you ever see a commercial site with more than one listing in Shopping or Business, though, it's more than likely in violation of the guidelines and you should inform us. We clean things like that up all the time.
Or maybe you skipped the day at school when the wider range of human motivations beyond financial profit was discussed. If so, you are missing a lot that could help you understand how people use the web.
Human Motivations - ah, you mean the last main motivational theory that's called 'Self Actualisation', now ofcourse known as Self Realisation.
I know exactly how human motivation works thanks very much and I'd advise you to not take the mickey until you have a grasp of the subject. Basic motivation is the same for all upto a certain point then people choose their path, which is what I think you were trying to convey. You are saying that Video Games are on the same excitement level as Data Inputting of websites.
hmmmmm, but they are at too a different a pleasure scale to even be considered 'enjoyable'. Playing football or drinking is enjoyable. Sorry, but data input is way too a low level an activity to fall under the feeling of 'fun'. That activity will lose out over a more appealing one, but if anyone enjoys endless typing, then they've found their pleasure in life.
Where do these editors come from. Mind you there are nearly 65'000 of them so........
Funny, my mom used to say the same thing about video games when I was a teenager. ;-) "How can you think that's fun? You're just sitting there moving a joystick around!"
Meanwhile, I can't stand playing football and I used to cut gym class whenever we had to play contact sports. I'm female, of course, but the point stands: people just enjoy different things.
If you can't comprehend how any other person on the planet could possibly enjoy something that you personally do not, and therefore have to make up byzantine conspiracy theories about why they must be doing it, I feel very sorry for you. Even my mom was able to figure that much out. :-)
If you ever see a commercial site with more than one listing in Shopping or Business, though, it's more than likely in violation of the guidelines and you should inform us. We clean things like that up all the time.
I know of two sites (I just checked). One is in there 7 times and the other 5 times. Different categories.
Then my site was refused. That's why I thought there was something dishonest going on.
Then when I tried to become an editor (for a different category that what's mentioned above), and I was turned down, that made me even more suspicious of everything going on.
I think the DMOZ concept is a great one. I'm not an enemy of the ODP. I personally know what it's like to work in a soup line, and do other volunteer work (which would have included the ODP until my ap was rejected). I also know how it feels to think that no one appreciates your labor. So to the "good editors": Your work is appreciated. It's just that your good work has shadowed by someone else's bad work.
And for the record, not every person questioning DMOZ is a 'spammer'. I'm not. There are real reasons why people start threads about a DMOZ Blacklist. There's just a lot of people wondering what's going on.
On more than one occasion I've actually looked at a submission, left it to deal with later, and found that another editor had reviewed it before I came back. Since there are so many editors and so many sites awaiting review, I don't think one editor who decided to ignore a site would make any difference in the overall speed of review, any more than one donor who tells the American Way not to use his donation for a certain charity actually changes the amount of money received by the charity. It's the overall donation amount, and the overall ratio of submission reviews to submissions, that makes the difference.
One wouldn't, but 1 multiplied by thousands of editors not doing their jobs, and you have thousands of sites or spam not being dealt with. Then you have new submissions on top of that every single day, Editors miss a few days a month and you have a real speed problem. It can get out of control, which sounds like what's happened over the years.
Editors may not edit for a number of reasons:
1. Better things to do
2. Sickness
3. Procrastination
4. Not urgent enough a task
5. Deliberately not indexing sites
or whatever else springs to mind. Workloads can bring a service to it's knees, but hang on, there's no profit generation involved here, so it doesn't really matter who gets shafted in the process does it.
In fact, why not just dump all the sites out of dmoz and start again. It seems like many categories don't have editors or that they are empty, so a spring clean might work. Yeah, that would take care of the spam problem and loosen the 'control' aspect.
You see, a perfect example of tunnel vision. If by that reasoning
1)then why add anything more to any category?
2)why 10,000 back links for topix news service-one finds their website.
3)You know full well what a dmoz listing means-so just because my competitors got on the web earlier, they should get the advantage. And who is to say that my site isn't better and more advantageous to the surfer?
>>>>And, you have to ask yourself why 9000 people who could edit there, choose not to do so? <<<<
At least you admit that the odp is not staying current and is lopsided. The whole point is-if google treated the odp as any other link and didn't use it as it's directory- it would make no difference. Until then, the odp should have the responsibility to treat with fairness via a paid staff to keep current the areas no one else wants to work in.
Personally, I could care less about the odp. I did a survey among the pta parents in my kids school. Out of 59 I questioned -one knew what the odp was. Only because he had worked with his company's website.
One more thing- I am sick of the old retort-"we can't help what google does with our info, it is there for anyone to use and download freely."
Yea but I know that most of these odp editors that roam these forums with a feeling of being superior have nightmares about the day google turns it's back on the odp. Because that will be the day the stake is driven right thru the heart of the odp. And it will die. And I will be a HAPPY man because then my competitors will no longer have an advantage and you editors will not be able to go thru the forums proclaiming your odp mantra.
Each editor does what they find interesting to do, as and when they want to do it. That's the best way of harnessing the volunteer collective.
The result today is another thousand sites added, and a number of ineligible sites de-listed, and a pile of spam in unreviewed dumped in the bin. No-one cares who added which sites, or where (as long as the guidelines were followed) just as long as the directory content today is better than it was yesterday.
If an editor is found obsessing about a particuler site, or "site tending", that often leads to finding a trail of abuse that is then swiftly dealt with.
There was a category for the tsunami, and for Katrina already live whilst the water was still rising. How much more "current" do you want than that?
And because the ODP is a directory, not a listing service, it really doesn't matter how editors find sites. If I list 50 sites tonight, no one who uses the directory is going to care whether I found them in a pile of submissions or by following links. The directory will be fifty sites larger than it was, and that's equally good either way.
Yea but I know that most of these odp editors that roam these forums with a feeling of being superior have nightmares about the day google turns it's back on the odp. Because that will be the day the stake is driven right thru the heart of the odp. And it will die.
There iit is...the odp mantra...at least part of it.
I really think it is time most of these editors asked themselves- are you webmasters or are you editors. I think if you are really going to jump into these forums you should take your editor hats off. If someone wants to question editors we can always go to that well known forum -the rz. You can get all the abuse there you will ever need. They line up there to give abuse.
Then just turn off the tap! Shut down the data dump and it will happen! Google no longer uses you...your wish will come true. But I think the party going on is all the frustrated people that have tried to get web sites listed and have gotten nothing but abuse and condescending attitudes. Best day in web history.
Go ahead, turn it off...If it is the general consensus of all the editors I am sure that it could be done.
Now, you really didn't mean it did you.
Yes. I think you're starting to get it. (-:
Seriously, if you care about getting into the ODP, it's pretty valuable information, isn't it? Some websites offer paid links. With those websites, you can call the shots. If they take your money, they owe you some speedy action on your specific, individual site which you have paid them to link to. Other websites--from Stanford University on down to some teenager's Harry Potter website--do not offer paid links. If you want a link from websites like those, you have to make sure that your site is one that would appeal to the webmaster of the other site, you have to make sure the webmaster of the other site can easily find your site, and you have to be patient, because they may have other priorities that they think are more important to their website.
The ODP is one of the latter kind of site. You don't have to pay, but you do have to put up with the fact that the webmaster (in this case, a collective of webmasters) may either not want to link to the kind of site that yours is, or consider adding a link from their site to yours a rather low-priority action in the grander scheme of their websites.
I'm sure there are much higher-ranking, higher-prestige websites out there that you must already have run into this situation with. Have you tried to get Stanford University's homepage to link to you, for example? It can be done, but you'd have to have a site they'd really want to exchange links with--another university or educational organization, for example--and you'd probably still need to wait until they finished updating their graduate school pages to their satisfaction.
So the other 10 get booted? or are they moved to this dump section? If they are simply moved to another section then that's most of the problem right there.
Once indentified as spam etc, why not just purge them.
There are categories in which, of every ten submissions sent in to us by webmasters via email, nine are flatly unlistable, because they are either already listed under another URL or they are a type of site we don't index.
If I start going through the unreviewed sites, then I delete the nine bad ones and list the one good one. However, during the time it takes me to do that, I could have used another method and listed five good sites.
So as you can imagine, editors of categories with terrible signal-noise ratios would often rather look somewhere other than the submissions pile. And that's just fine, really. As long as good sites are getting listed, we don't really care where they came from.
But there aren't really any shortcuts in webmastering. It's all quite circular. If you have an ODP listing, maybe that makes individual webmasters more likely to link to you; maybe it improves your Google standing a little. If you're listed in Google, maybe that makes individual webmasters more likely to link to you; maybe it makes an ODP editor more likely to notice your site. If you have lots of inbound links, maybe it makes an ODP editor more likely to notice your site, and certainly it improves your Google standing. If you have good content that lots of people want to use, it unquestionably improves all three.
You need to go back and look at the messages in this forum to understand about this. First off, I don't think stanford would be much interested in linking to a site that is not an educational site. I do have plenty of original content on this site (the only site I ever bothered to submit-because of the waste of time factor involved with the odp) but I don't believe that any university would want to link to it. It is a widget dealer site. It would be an off topic link.
First off, the ODP is not interested in linking to affiliates, scrapers, non-unique-content sites, sites spread over multiple domains, and many other types of sites specified in the guidelines - but thousands of such sites are submitted everyday.
But even if you DID have an educational site, the sort of site Stanford might be interested in linking to, they probably wouldn't consider adding a link to your particular site a very high priority. They might be in the middle of adding links about a different topic. They might be checking their existing links and deleting ones that don't work. They might be redesigning the colors on their site. The webmaster might also be on the admissions board and not be doing any work on the site at all that month. Or maybe he gets so many "link exchange requests" from scraper sites and pharmaceutical companies that he automatically puts link requests into his spam filter, and you'd have to find another way of bringing your site to his attention.
All of that's applicable at the ODP as well.
What does that have to do with my site?
Why?
I mean, if it's more efficient for a volunteer to find sites to list someplace other than an email box clogged with spam, it'd also be more efficient for a paid staffperson to do the same thing, wouldn't it?
If I was paying somebody to do work on my website, I'd sure want him or her to be doing the most efficient thing possible. Wouldn't you?
Site suggestions are really just suggestions, the same as if you email a random webmaster and suggest that he link to you. Some will, some won't, some would but they might never read your email, some will but not till a year later. None, zero, will want to hire a new employee to make sure your suggestion is implemented as soon as possible.
It never hurts to ask, but you need other strategies too, is all I'm saying.
So that you can have them work in those categories no one wants to work in. Update those rotted categories. Go back and read my posts if you don't understand what I am talking about.
And to the one that says they can't cater to someone that wants a listing just so they have a marketing advantage-
That is what my competitors have. I just want a level playing field. I would like to have this site listed in odp too. I would like to be in the google directory too. The only way for that to happen is to get listed or for google to quit using the odp.
You editors don't want google. You want to be left alone(however you say that you can ignore that pile of submitters and spammers so I don't understand how you are bothered). SO- turn of the data dump.
Who says I don't have other strategies. But to run to catch up to my competitors that are already listed means 100's of hours of manpower that they don't have to do. It also means-never, ever a google directory listing.
The editors always say you need to go improve your site in other ways. I do that ...not for the odp but for the sake of the site itself. It matters not one whit how attractive I make it for the odp because my categories have not been worked in since forever. That is what you need to get paid staff for. To pick up the slack. Either that or do away with those categories.
However, during the time it takes me to do that, I could have used another method and listed five good sites
Ahh, so instead of doing the job that all editors love, you'd rather go out and surf for good sites.
hmmmm, seems to me that's the whole crux of the matter. I see what you mean, but is that really the right attitude, when editors constantly complain about spam sites, some editors are not deleting that spam - instead they surf looking for the good stuff. It would be quicker to just get rid of the crap, then it would tidy up dmoz Yes?.
Then you can go out and list the good, fun stuff.
I wondered if that was what was happening lol.
editors of categories with terrible signal-noise ratios would often rather look somewhere other than the submissions pile. And that's just fine, really.
Oh jeeze! So this is about what the editors would rather do - oh my god. How is that going to get rid of the problem. It's not.
So as you can imagine, As long as good sites are getting listed, we don't really care where they came from
It gets worse. Sorry guys, but it does sound like you editors don't give a stuff about the one thing you all moan about - the dump bin. How does that make dmoz easier to run hehe. It does look and sound that way, and if you really think that people will just roll over and accept what dmoz does cos it's dmoz, you are so wrong. It seems that if you are a quality site owner - then you have nothing to worry about, but if the next quality site doesn't match such a high standard anyway - you might as well forget it people, as no matter how USEFUL a site or niche you have, you ain't getting in.
