Can Competitors Resubmitting Cause Neg Effects?

I've definitely learned a lot in the past few months about submitting to DMOZ. One thing that I didn't know about is the resubmitting of the same site if it's not accepted. I have only resubmitted my site a couple times over the past few months, so *hopefully* that's not too many.

Anyways, my question is - what is to stop a competing company from submitting their competitor's website to DMOZ in 50 different categories, just to purposely label their competition as a "spammer"? I'm sure there have to be safeguards in place, but I'm just curious how this works, and how it can be prevented since normal users can't see if our site has been submitted previously through the directory itself. My curiosity always gets the best of me.

We have editors so experienced in dealing with spam that the way they work out who did what is almost psychic. Maybe we should patent one or two of them.

The best guard against this is that being labeled a spammer will not effect legitimate listing. If widgetsite.com fits in /This/Category/About/Widgets, it should remain there, even if a hundred different widgetsite.com/this/is/a/deeplink urls are submitted to different categories. We don't remove sites for this. In fact, the only things that can really get a site banned would be excessive harassment of an editor (though to my knowledge that has never happened) or an attempt to bribe an editor. And even then the case against you would have to be airtight.

Re: Can Competitors Resubmitting Cause Neg Effects

I've dealt with a few cases of this. See, we really don't know whether the spammer has conned the victim (webmaster) into paying him to "sumbit his site to 16 zillion search engines, and keep it fresh-as-a-cow-patty by resumbitting it every month".

So I contact the WEBMASTER (not the submitter!). I tell him somebody is trying to get him banned by stupid submittal tricks, and it may be a competitor or an ignorant employee or a viscious fraudulent SERP perp. But if he can get it stopped, please do so. I've gotten responses (which I tended to believe) indicating all three possibilities were involved. And in nearly all cases I got the spamming stopped, which was all I was really after.

Re: Can Competitors Resubmitting Cause Neg Effects

In fact, the only things that can really get a site banned would be excessive harassment of an editor (though to my knowledge that has never happened)

Click to expand...

Unfortunately this has already happened.

Re: Can Competitors Resubmitting Cause Neg Effects

Massive or blatant abuse of the submittal process does get sites banned. "I have automatically submitted every page of my site, under a dozen different alias domain names, every day for the past six months, and not only did NONE of those pages get added, those touchy editors actually took out the three listings I already had. Now, how am I supposed to market my autosubmit-to-ODP script?" Duh. (And I'm not making this up. I don't have the imagination to make this kind of stuff up.)

Read the submittal policies: banning is explicitly mentioned as a possible penalty. And we use Roman-law definitions: pestilentiality is not defined by a list of pestilential actions; it's in the mind of the editor. But we don't like to remove sites that have good unique content, so we ban reluctantly.

Re: Can Competitors Resubmitting Cause Neg Effects

My experience with spammers is that the sites/deeplinks they are submitting don't belong anyway. If I find a good site that is listed in the correct category already, but happens to have a long list of deleted submissions, I just shrug and delete the extra copy I'm handling too. This is so rare compared to real spamming, I wouldn't worry about it.

Re: Can Competitors Resubmitting Cause Neg Effects

Alrighty, thanks for all the replies. Glad to know, I don't think I have any enemies out there, but ya never know...