hutcheson

Re: Experienced editor / Moderator for article rev You did post in our German-language forum to request a review of the translated text also, I hope? (Technical language can be surprisingly tricky to translate.)

The guidelines say: "Pick the ONE category that BEST fits the site focus."

I confess to being utterly confused by that logic. If most of what you are selling is WWII militaria, then explain again, slowly and in detail, why the WWII militaria category is NOT the most appropriate place?

It is waiting review in Shopping/Antiques_and_Collectibles/Militaria/World_War_II . You'll always get a quicker review by picking the right category the first time around. We know this is hard sometimes, so (unlike Yahoo) we don't delete your submittal out of hand just because you submitted to the wrong place. But many editors (including me) do not actually list sites in a category unless they are editing in that category. If a site goes somewhere else, they move it there to be reviewed in the context of that category. This may seem like more work for us and more delay for you (and it is both), but it allows us to make the necessary checks for duplication of content and consistency of listing styles (which we cannot make from a distance except in categories we know very well.) You will, not always but frequently, get a SLOWER review by submitting the site again. Why? Well, if we delete the older of duplicate submissions (which some editors do manually, and the software does automatically) AND if editors review the sites in chronological order (which many do) ... then your new submittal just sent you to the back of the line. As for requesting a site review, there is not really any way of doing that except "Add URL" in the appropriate category. Sometimes as a byproduct of a "status request" in the forums, an editor will in fact review and possibly even list the site, but there's never a guarantee.

ODP search will take 3 days to 3 weeks (or more) to be updated. Pay no attention to it anyway; nobody uses it but busy editors and anxious webmasters. And the old URL still works.

Unlikely. There are some standard transformations I make on descriptions: "sells new widgets", "sells old widgets" -- unchanged "sells old and new widgets" -- to "sells widgets" "sells ace widgets," "sells ace and acme widgets" -- unchanged "sells widgets from all known brand", "sells widgets by ace, acme, bland, cortical, dexter, erato, finnegan, glamour, helical, idiowids, ..." -- "sells widgets" That is, "restrictive descriptions" stay, "elaborative (keyword)lists" don't. I (like the last editor) think the suggested description was more the latter. >>I apologize, I made sure the shop us online with the new website address was on their... It is not you who need to apologize. I looked again....it was there, and I missed it the first time.

Typically, we won't change a URL unless the old one doesn't work or points to the new one with a "we're moving" indication. Neither is obviously true here; but since the individual product links on the main page point to the new domain, it's evidently legitimate. So it's done.

It was moved to Business/Investing/Retirement_Planning , where it is currently waiting review.

The "front page navigation" is seriously (ok then, totally) disfunctional. So the relevant question is not so much "when will this site be reviewed" but "how long will it spend in the queue before being deleted for being completely broken?"

>>So as for me, I'll keep filing the abuse reports (sorry about that apeuro) There are many kinds of volunteers. Well-documented, valid (or at least plausible) abuse reports are perhaps not liked but are truly appreciated. We'll take all of them you can generate.

Looks like we need a "Directories" category (with Webrings under it, perhaps.)

Google closing? All vocal metas and editalls are professional SERP perps? Whereas the guidelines absolutely forbid SEOers to be editors, so they have to sneak in? Welcome to planet earth, and please tell us more about your home.

There are actually less than a dozen sites waiting review there. (This is no guarantee of a quick review, but it's surely better than what we often have to tell people.)

I don't even HAVE to look this one up:-(. 1000+ sites waiting review, most of them sorta-on-topic, but many of them shrouded-affiliate spam. If you're new here, that means a quick triage-pass through the category is not likely to cut the numbers down much, and it takes much longer to review each site. The good news is, um, um, well, now you know to plan for it.

>>Not something that affects a listing Well, maybe. A lot of our editors are across the pond, so graphics-heavy pages are especially slow. A website that takes too long to review -- MAY get a "stop page load" click as the editor goes on to something less painfully slow. It's not a rejection, it's just ... another delay. But you need to be worrying not just about the ODP editor -- many potential customers will bail out and look for a faster site also. If it's a matter of the legal form they know they want, yes, they'll wait for it. If it's a matter of the corporate logo or some oversized marbleized graphic navigation buttons...many will not.

Waiting review, with several dozen other sites. It looks like we need a "UK" subcategory.

>>Say a couple of months..?? I would not say that. LOTS of inappropriate submissions. But not all OBVIOUSLY inappropriate. And, unlike Yahoo, we try to find a place for the ones that we think might have a place.

>>When it comes to their pocket book, there isn't much an affiliate webmaster won't do to get his/her site listed. They have little or no regard for anyone else and its not going to get better as the net evolves. >Wow, I can't believe this. I just can't believe this. Believe it, man. Believe it. You see your three sites, and a two or three competitors. I see three hundred submittals like this ... every week. And I'm not one of the editors most active in the spam-prone categories! There are more than 5,000 submittals like this to the ODP ... every DAY. It's like the electron -- just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and doesn't affect you personally. "Pure affiliate sites" are the caltrops on the information superhighway, grit in the gears of the e-conomy, the Pravda of the information age. Your own site review is being significantly impacted; there is really nothing any of us can do about that. But you have received considerable valuable advice about what you need to do in order to build a website that effectivelys represent your company's business. If you can learn to believe it, and convince your web developer to design as if it were true, you'll have profited. There's no charge. Mention us to your friends.

>>no one is better suited for spotting such affiliates than the webmaster that was just rejected for being an affiliate. I wouldn't go quite that far. A fair number of the sites accused aren't, um, easily verified. But even if half of the sites spotted are verifiable (and I believe that's about the right percentage) then we're still happy to hear about them. Conversely, as a webmaster you have to remember that you can't just slip by an ODP editor to dive in the gravy train; you have to remember that anyone can suggest (via the "Update URL" form, as well as forums like these) that a site should be moved or removed.

Re: Submission status for http://www.leocanhelp.co Even Laisha might let this one slide. Although I too prefer "queue", "que" is also in the dictionary, and is widely used, esp. by mathematicians.

Sorry, looks like we've been "divided by a common language" again. I meant, since the URL change you requested could be immediately verified by looking at the old ULR, it was obvious that the change should be made immediately....and so I immediately made it. You did exactly the right thing: put up the new site, changed the OLD site to redirect to the new one, and requested a URL change via "Update URL." If you had omitted the second step, we would NOT have been able to easily validate your request, since we couldn't easily tell whether someone else were trying to hijack your ODP listing (by changing the URL to point to their own site.) If you had omitted the THIRD step, we have tools to find and correct redirections, but they are not yet fully automated...so the update might have been made immediately, but not so quickly. The extra detail is not about your site, which is OK, but to educate all the forum lurkers who might someday need to move their own sites.

There's a very small backlog there. Actually, there's no backlog now. Since the URL change could be easily verified from the old URL, the update was a no-brainer.

In a case like this, the question is not "unique content" (you apparently have it) but "deeplinks." The guidelines say that deeplinks are the exception rather than the rule. In Shopping categories there are "almost no" exceptions -- we have to do this, or else unscrupulous SERP perps would tell every shopping site to submit every page. Walmart.com would have 50,000 entries, amazon.com would have a page of books on every subject, barnesandnoble.com would want the same. And even in Shopping, there would be a "no deeplinks in subcategories where the parent category is" principle to which there is, IMO, no appropriate exception. We list (and submitters should try to find, as the submitting guidelines say) the ONE most appropriate category for the whole site.

see http://www.resource-zone.com/showprofile.php?Cat=&User=editormike&page=10&what=showmembers

Only a couple of weeks? Shopping categories usually have a bit more backlog than that. In any case, that site doesn't seem to have been reviewed yet.