2 of my websites dropped from DMOZ after a month of acceptance

Two of my websites in very different categories were suddenly dropped only after 2-3 weeks of them being listed. I wonder why they were dropped so soon after acceptance. There were no content changes in the website and the sites had no downtimes either.

We delist websites, temporarily or permanently, for lots of possible reasons.
- Maybe they were listed by error, since corrected.
- Maybe they are in transit to a different category.
- Maybe they are awaiting a more detailed evaluation.

No website is guaranteed a permanent listing here. If your sites are listable, I expect they'll come back in due course.

Thank you for looking.. I also noticed that 4 of my aged and fairly popular football sites seems to have disappeared in the last few weeks ...

Age and popularity are not criteria that matter, one way or another. How would the editor know?

But removal of multiple related listings (where "related" certainly includes "same source") is a plausible theory: it certainly helps both users and website developers.

odp

What one Editor Giveth the Other taketh away

chrisranjana said:

What one Editor Giveth the Other taketh away

Click to expand...

Yes, it certainly is the prerogative of the editors to list or delist sites.. I have just mentioned it, because I found it strange that 6 of my sites were delisted most probably on the same day...

That could be cleanup of "related site" listings. But there are other possibilities. The sites may have been down that day, or may at least have appeared to the link checker to be down (possibly, for instance, because your server blocked the link checker).

hutcheson said:

That could be cleanup of "related site" listings. But there are other possibilities. The sites may have been down that day, or may at least have appeared to the link checker to be down (possibly, for instance, because your server blocked the link checker).

Click to expand...

Though the sites were related to football, they were quite different, one about football rumours another football humour, another football chants .. football transfer news, football news .. and two fan sites of football players...
So the sites were very different and most content were submitted by visitors of the site

related = same owner + same type of content (all football)

Even if an owner decides to split the content over several domains DMOZ will treat this as 1 website, which will get max one listing.
It is the owners responsibility to link the different domains together. It is not DMOZ's task to do so if the owner decides not to link all content with each other.

Suggesting such related domains is against our guidelines.

Multiple submissions of the same or related sites may result in the exclusion and/or deletion of those and all affiliated sites.

Click to expand...

The Submittal Policies don't talk about not submitting "not-different" sites.

They talk about not submitting "related" sites.

Sites such as you describe are on a similar topic from a similar source. According to the submittal policy, submitters MUST treat them all as a single suggestion.

This is for the editor's protection. You can probably imagine how many self-serving webmasters create lots and lots of tiny sites to try to get better visibility in the search engines and directories. (Experienced editors don't have to imagine: we've seen them!) So this policy is enforced rigorously: more rigorously than required for the SURFERS' good, because it's needed to protect the editors.

And yes, the policy will affect some innocent website owners who arranged their domain names ignorantly, without malice or deceit in mind. But look at it the other way: the policy encourages website owners to integrate all their related content--so that a surfer who finds any part of it can stumble into the rest. Which is indisputably the right way to do website navigation anyway.

Do the navigation right, and it won't matter that there's only one link into the material--all will be visible at that one place.

And once THAT concept is grasped, then the realization that what's unique about YOUR site is that YOU put it together, not that it contains information on whatever particular subtopics you chose....ALL websites are ultimately personal. And the idea of having separate domain names for each separate subtopic, which aren't tied back to YOU, YOURSELF (the branded element) can be seen as the fallacy which it is.

And once the website is clearly unified by a common domain name, then the ODP editors can be more comfortable about tracking "related" material--and therefore more comfortable about deeplinking different subpages of the site.

Because a single site is MORE valuable than a group of "different but related" sites with exactly the same content....and it's often more worthy of multiple listings in a directory, NEVER worthy of fewer listings.

Yes, I know, this is not what the spammers tell you. They say, have a hundred sites, and when one con is spotted, you can continue the others undetected. But this is the way the honest part of the web works.

Thank you for the clarification...

However my sites were not created on the same day together..
I created the first one 6 years back and the latest one was created just a few months back.

I started out with a small topic and built a website in HTML and as time passed I took on greater challenges and tried to build bigger dynamic sites ..A few sites I had also acquired from others..

Also since I am an individual with limited resources, it is difficult for me to always overhaul my website to accomodate a new idea/topic ...

It is much more cost effective to keep the old one as it is and build a new site on a separate topic...

I would also ask the Mods to please close the thread as the Editors have mentioned the reasons of why the sites might have been delisted

No need to close the thread. Just don't post again.