hutcheson

>I believe, though, that having a link on a bunch of pages with very low page rank can lower your page rank. Based on the published algorithms, I believe that this cannot, mathematically speaking, be true. The usual caveat applies: numerical approximations can very occasionally do wierd things with what seem like stable computations. But even so, there are lots worse things to worry about, IMO, than having a link from a low-ranked page.

large backlog.

>However the ordering processes are all handled by one company (I don't know. Does that make them an affilate). Let me answer this way. What can be unique about a shopping site? What is unique about Walmart store #457 is not the products it carries -- every item there is available at 2000 other Walmarts, not to mention other outlets. What is unique is the service: that I can drive 2 miles from my home at 123 Park Lane, Podunk Hills, AK, pick up my gallon of milk, and have it home before it curdles. So there are two items involved -- the product (milk) and the service (delivered to a particular location). The online equivalent to "service" is the company that handles the order process. Different order processor might mean "different content" and a website built around it might thus be listable. But the same product from the same "order processor" is CERTAINLY "unique" in no way, and a website built around that would be non-listable.

>Popular and honest are both correct - they are not overstating what I know to be fact. This may be true: but neither fact is something that could be deduced from a website review. So -- a _website_ reviewer shouldn't mention it. This is a problem that we frequently see with new editors very knowledgeable on a _subject_ but (unsurprisingly) not experienced in writing website reviews. It's very hard for them to write a website when they have so much to say about its owner, its visitors, etc. In your example, for example, "honest" is about the website owner and "popular" is about (the size of) its audience. You all can help by thinking about suggested descriptions from that point of view. So many times they start out "We are dedicated to..." -- Look, we don't care whether you're a dilettante or obsessed enough to be a menace to society. Just tell us what you've provided on the website. And they end with "for neophytes, experienced widget-twiddlers, or anyone else interested in ..." Again, if you put the site on the web, by definition your audience is self-selected without any concern for your ideal criteria. Leave all that stuff out. [This public service announcement by the author of internal ODP forum threads "Sheer Dreck I: The Search for Hype" and various sequels chronicling the eternal war against the dark side of the linguistic force.]

trust us on this one, spearmaster: editing in that category is more than all it will take to be accused of not only of bias but also of corruption, mopery, dopery, and a god-complex. Life: Edit a little, whine a little, laugh at the other editors' whining a little. Repeat while conscious.

Yes, we know much of the evil that lurks in the hearts of hotel reservation affiliate systems. We know that they recognized the off-site links in their affiliates were causing them to be too easily recognized and deleted. We know that they have spent considerable effort coming up with ways of concealing that affiliation: this site does, in fact, use one of the new stealth affiliate systems that doesn't include the tell-tale "offsite affiliate links." This does not make a site "not-spam", it merely makes it "devious-spam."

In a case like this, I believe the preferred approach is to list it in the "Europe" category, but mention the three countries in the description.

Re: http://www.highrollerhaven.com and index wait >>I worked with art designers and web developers to build the content I wanted. So that being, the case, I would say that gives me unique content. I'm sorry, but I can't imagine any logical way that that follows. Here's how an editor would look at a site there: the "on-topic" content for that category is "ability to gamble online." The "unique" part of it is "you can't gamble like this anywhere else online." Now, I understand that all such sites provide only a few games, and therefore the difference between listed sites and unlisted sites is between "a miniscule smidgen of unique content" and "not an iota of unique content", which is a hard distinction to make. But a site that merely provides access to gambling services at another site is an easy no-brainer, no-lister.

Pick the one best category. Since you seem to have a broad line of construction materials, that would be a higher level category. It is very unlikely that a retail site be linked for each subcategory where it has some applicable product for sale. Walmart.com has 5 listings, of which 2 are related to their retail products. How many product lines do you have? How many do they have?

We can't speak for Yahoo, of course: you pays your money (to them) and you get reviewed (by them) ... for a year, and then you pays again. What does a phone book Yellow Pages ad cost? How much is it worth to YOU? Google is even more tenuous. You can submit to them, but if there are no other links to it, it may end up as page number 3.999 billion out of 4 billion. They take 5-9 weeks, but it may be much longer than that before it moves up to a visible spot in any real search. You don't mention whether you even submitted to US, and if so, to what category...which makes it kind of difficult to guess how long it might be. Of course, even looking at the category, there are only about three useful answers we can give: 1) There wasn't much there, so I did them all. The site is now listed. 2) There are LOTS of sites waiting there. Expect a LONG wait. 3) There are only a few sites waiting there, but still, don't be surprised by a LONG wait. Yahoo has a guaranteed review in X days. The ODP doesn't ever. We have a "guaranteed review someday", and we can say that the "average delay" is about 3 months (simple arithmetic -- we review about 6-7000 sites a day, and there are approximately 100 times that total in unreviewed--a number that has been fairly stable lately.) Some submittals are rejected within minutes; a few are accepted within minutes. But some have been waiting for years. It depends on what folk volunteer to do.

It's an old European Joke. "What do you call someone who speaks three languages?" "trilingual" "What do you call someone who speaks two languages?" "bilingual" "What do you call someone sho speaks one language?" "American"

[insert here the faint sound of a very very tiny bit of sympathy being extended] You know, the submittal guidelines are not just for editor convenience. They are for your own protection. You blatantly broke them, the editors got a wee bit careless, and the site went into limbo. I saw another similar case yesterday. Some pest submitted their site a dozen or so times. I deleted it eleven or so times (with some other spam, and a note saying in effect "mass delete of duplicate submittals, inappropriate deeplinks, notorious spam, etc." I passed the last submittal on to something near the correct category. An experienced editor saw the note on the site -- eleven times -- and deleted the last copy with a note "see above." Whose fault was that? Mine, for using a somewhat generic note on the 2000 or so spam submittals I deleted this weekend? (I do not accept that!) The other editors, for misinterpreting a somewhat cryptic note, in the process of dealing with what was doubtless a whole passel of spam in their categories? Or ... the submitter: for doing what the guidelines plainly say not to do? And who is hurt most? From the outside, you don't see the amount of effort spent to try to find every deserving site a home somewhere. And especially with inexperienced editors, sites get dropped that could have been shuffled around to a good home. (From the outside, you don't see the experienced editors ranting in the forums about that very thing!) We'll lean over backwards, especially for submittals from the "great unwashed public." But the professional SERP perps among you are really committing negligent malpractice when you make these kinds of mistakes -- you are causing your own clients trouble. It will be worth your while to know not only the submittal guidelines, but also the editor guidelines. Your clients will be better served to be told why they can't be listed in the ODP than to be foisted off with false promises or irrelevant anecdotes. Well, that's the sermon for today. Most submittal damage can be repaired, with acts of contrition and the help of sympathetic editors. Go forth and sin no more.

Just pick the right category, and don't worry how many sites are in it. An Oklahoma category is "right" because your place of business is there. The Casters category looks "not right" to me, because you have a number of other "materials handling" products. So don't submit there. Remember that if you submit it to the wrong category, it goes through that whole queue, then gets shipped to the right category and may get to wait in THAT queue. Note also that there's no predicting which order the queue will be reviewed in. Some editors do "chronological" order. I hardly ever do -- I'll happily delete obvious spam first, then I'll look for submittals that look like "honest description of site that probably really belongs here." (Often, these can be reviewed easily and added quickly.)

Hey, so long as your post is in English, it's not off-topic. It is just that, in the Italian-language forum, you'll see more of the editors who speak Italian -- and they're the ones who will review your site.

>>If your site content for both English and Italian speaking audiences you can be listed in both the English and Italian sections of the directory. Yes, absolutely. For this purpose please ignore the submittal guidelines and submit the site to both languages. But -- help us out a little here. Many editors are American or otherwise monolingual. In the Italian-language category, submit an Italian title and description. In the English-language category, submit an English title and description. If I (reading English only) see a site with Italian title and description, I'm just going to send it over to a World/Italiano category....where the editor can read the description, but may not be able to write an English description to send back with the English content. (Perhaps I should mention that this is a general request, not a personal rebuke. I haven't seen the submittals for this particular site.)

gasp... (keyword-burping)

>>In fact we are working for all Europe And you're trying to list it in "France?" That's a very Napoleonic attitude.

There's only one DMOZ robot, and he eats dead sites. Not raw, not raw: he waits for an editor to come around with the condiments. When I'm doing cheese sauce rounds, I typically check for "Update URL" requests that might give me a clue as to what happened to the sites Robozilla culled -- which is why the advice you were given is good. Just say "update".

I'm obviously missing something here. I do not understand this bizarre insistance on our including this content only as a deeplink? The converse logic is simple. We prefer to list domains, because we know that, every month, thousands of the sites we list get shuffled around, and we have to go to a lot of work to repair the deeplinks. We told the doctor, it hurts when we do that. He said don't do that. So we try not to do that.

Thanks for the list. For the record, regular editors do whatever they feel like doing. Some of them regularly re-review sites; others spend their time searching for new sites, or weeding the backlog of unreviewed sites, or nattering in the external forums. There are two ways we can go with this. You can take this information as evidence of knowledge and interest in those categories, dredge up a new site or two, and volunteer to edit that category yourself, or you can hope one of the current volunteers will fix it. For the record, if you identify specific problems (as you just did) some editor will usually fix them pretty quickly. So if you want them left as fodder for your own editing mill, best speak up quickly.

I'm with Netscape 4 on this one. To my mind it's conceptually no different from a frame -- you need the file to display the page, the file isn't there -- man, you got a broken page. And, frankly, as a webmaster I'd want to know ten minutes before immediately, if the page I uploaded is broken. I know that there are a lot of webmasters out there who really don't "know" html in any grammatical sense, who sort of schlep stuff together -- just like they were hacking a brochure in MS-Word -- and who really can't understand computer-generated errors, let alone figure out how to fix them. And the browsers don't want to be in the business of reporting errors, or of being seen as being too "picky" about common ones, so they try to do "something sensible" with them. And you know what we get? A world in which every bleeding page has to be tested with every version of every common browser, because each one of them does something different -- sensible or accidental -- with this grammatically-incoherent stuff that should have been strangled before birth. So a browser that immediately chokes on anything the least bit out-of-line with the most restrictive standard possible is ... what I most want (and really don't have) for all my own development work.

Contact staff@dmoz.org . They've given permission for that before, and seemed pleased to do it. But I don't think we can give permission, and I don't think the public license is clear on that point.

The site has a bad rep for submitting non-functional pages and aggressive submitting to the wrong categories. The last of many copies of submittals to English-language categories may have been deleted; at any rate, it wasn't still in the queue in that category. I added it to the unreviewed queue. Side note: submitting a site dozens of times does not improve its chances of getting listed. It improves its chances of having all its duplicate submittals deleted accidentally, instead of all but one. (Of course, in extreme cases like another one I'm working today, every one should be deleted.) It improves its chances of editors deleting it simply because it's already been looked at dozens of times, so "surely it has all the listings it deserves." You did your site a real disservice by that kind of thing. I have partially repaired the damage, but there are still almost a hundred sites to review in that category, most of whom (possibly including yours) belong in a more specific category. That means it will take longer for an editor to review the sites, and -- for editors like me who are willing to help out but don't know French geography well enough to find the most specific relevant category -- it means we can hardly work effectively there at all. Therefore: expect a long wait. The situation in Regional/France is improving, but it is not one of the more heavily edited regions.

>I believe dmoz has a responsibility to make sure that what it lists (and what it continues to list) is above board. You are wrong. DMOZ is not the cops. DMOZ is not the inquisition. It cannot and will not be. The editor's guidelines say "not to list obviously illegal sites (based on California law)," and "an editor does not need to list sites which are illegal in his own jurisdiction. In the case of a not-obviously-illegal but otherwise listable site, the editor's _job_ is to list. And since we're all volunteers, ther are NO positive responsibilities associated with editing. Whatever an editor does that doesn't violate the editing guidelines, and does improve the directory, is acceptable. Again, editors are especially NOT allowed to take the word of an angry e-mailer about the legality of a site. That's right, FORBIDDEN. Again, what are the responsibilities DMOZ has toward submitters? There is one only. Submitted sites will be reviewed. Not necessarily listed, not necessarily acted on, espectially not acted on in any particular time, most especially not responded to. Staff does not have a responsibility to answer e-mail, especially e-mail from angry people who obviously have taken so little trouble to understand who they are writing to, and what they do; and who make, um, unconsidered legal charges without providing the legal documentation. ... and whose association with veracity is rather remote. How, the skeptic asks, could someone have "refused" to do something ... without responding? >>since at best the appearances in the search engines of these dodgy sites cause problems for the genuine sites Sorry, this is the DIRECTORY department. We don't do search engines here. >>and at worst means that you may be effectively condoning illegal activity, in some cases. Sorry, we don't do condoning here. we just list websites. One of the quickest ways of becoming an ex-editor is to delete sites you don't condone. I can understand how frustrated you'd be with DMOZ if you were expecting all that. But the ODP is not the harbinger of the millenium, or even the Enforcement Agency of the New World Order. It's just a website directory.

Lemme see, is the response "you deeplink to our site and we'll have you in court before you can say 'Dallas Morning News'?" Not. The ODP license is for people that COPY ODP data, which for lightly-trafficked sites makes less sense (IMO) than simply linking. There are no requirements at all for linking. I believe this even includes linking in your own subframe. If these terms are too onerous for you, you can link to directory.google.com and deal with their lawyers. What are THEY going to say? "No, you lowlife, we don't need your stinking linkpop? Go link to AOL's directory?" I think not. We, like, DO links. You can link too; it's an open web (at least in the U.S. so far. )