Can someone tell me why my site is not in dmoz.org yet?

I submitted my business website to dmoz months ago, but it still does not show up on the site. Can someone please tell me what that problem is?
The url is <URL removed per forum ToS> it's been a while since I submitted it and nothing has happend. Please help me.

<email removed for user's sake>

Some volunteer will process your listing suggestion in time but we can't predict who or when that might be. Elapsed times can range from a few days to a few years. There is no need to re-suggest your website and doing so could be counter-productive because a later suggestion overwrites any earlier one.

There are basically two possible reasons:

(1) The volunteer (like any other surfer) couldn't find your site. (You help the volunteer get over this difficulty, by suggesting it to a relevant category.)

(2) The volunteer found your site, but (like any other visitor) didn't find significant unique content on it. (Of course, you help with THIS by good navigation design, and by emphasizing the part of the site that is unique.)

hutcheson said:

There are basically two possible reasons:

(1) The volunteer (like any other surfer) couldn't find your site. (You help the volunteer get over this difficulty, by suggesting it to a relevant category.)

(2) The volunteer found your site, but (like any other visitor) didn't find significant unique content on it. (Of course, you help with THIS by good navigation design, and by emphasizing the part of the site that is unique.)

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It's all so possible there is no editor.
kind regards
Bert

It's all so possible there is no editor.

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No. Over 200 of us can edit any category that we wish - and we do.

Although I am a computer programmer, web site designer, and marketing communications professional I cannot understand how DMOZ works. I appreciate that editors are volunteers but it should be possible to see the status of a site submitted for consideration. This would give people confidence that their submission is pending . . . as you are warned about resubmitting.

A digital magazine I launched last year is now getting over 200,000 page views per month and although it is listed in all the major search engines it is not yet in DMOZ . .although I always thought that Alta Vista, and other search engines used DMOZ.

rogerlindley said:

Although I am a computer programmer, web site designer, and marketing communications professional I cannot understand how DMOZ works. I appreciate that editors are volunteers but it should be possible to see the status of a site submitted for consideration. This would give people confidence that their submission is pending . . . as you are warned about resubmitting.

A digital magazine I launched last year is now getting over 200,000 page views per month and although it is listed in all the major search engines it is not yet in DMOZ . .although I always thought that Alta Vista, and other search engines used DMOZ.

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If you think about the url as a suggestion (which is what it really is) its not really that hard to understand. You have suggested to the DMOZ volunteers that your URL might be useful to the directory. Eventually an editor will find your suggestion and have a look. If they feel that it is useful and compliant with the guidelines, it will be given a compliant title and description and included. If not it will be discarded. Either way you have helped the editors find and make changes to the category. As for why there is no status check, (limited resources aside) there are a multitude of reasons this is not available. Once you have suggested the URL the most probable status is that it hasn't been reviewed yet. Once its been reviewed there are only a couple status updates that could be given:
1)An editor reviewed it, found it guideline compliant and listed it - Of course you can see that simply by checking the category.
2)An editor reviewed it, found it non-compliant with the guidelines and therefor unlistable so it was discarded. - That's easily ascertained by reading the guidelines before suggesting the URL and seeing whether it meets the guidelines for inclusion and category criteria.
3)An editor reviewed the site and determined it was suggested to an inappropriate category, therefore it was forwarded on to the correct category for review and is again awaiting a volunteer in the new category to review it.

In all three cases there isn't anything else that can/or need be done from the suggesters side. It is in the hands of the Volunteers. As to the second part of your comment, many search vehicles use DMOZ data but in a lot of the cases (such as with Google) dmoz data plays only a part of their equation for returning search results. So finding a url through an alta vista search would not mean that a url has already been listed in dmoz. They simply found it through some of their other search result supply sources.

In this forum's early days, we used to respond to status requests. It very quickly became ugly when owners were told that their websites had been declined. The ensuing arguments weren't pretty and didn't help anybody - which is why we eventually stopped. There's an explanatory announcement Discontinuation of site status checks at the top of this forum.

You can self-check whether or not a website is listable by evaluating it against our guidelines. If it's listable, somebody will list it in time (but we can't predict who or when that might be). If it isn't, they won't.

Further, re-suggesting a listable site can slow its progress down. Re-suggesting an unlistable site is a pointless waste of effort.

jimnoble said:

In this forum's early days, we used to respond to status requests. It very quickly became ugly when owners were told that their websites had been declined. The ensuing arguments weren't pretty and didn't help anybody - which is why we eventually stopped. There's an explanatory announcement Discontinuation of site status checks at the top of this forum.

You can self-check whether or not a website is listable by evaluating it against our guidelines. If it's listable, somebody will list it in time (but we can't predict who or when that might be). If it isn't, they won't.

Further, re-suggesting a listable site can slow its progress down. Re-suggesting an unlistable site is a pointless waste of effort.

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I can appreciate that there are some people out there that find it very difficult to take 'No' for an answer and I well remember the beginning of the internet when URLs were few and far between. Today, it must be a very daunting task trying to keep on top of every request to be added to the directory. The very reason why I have not applied to be an editor - a job I would love - but unfortunately cannot commit time to it. One day.
I'm pretty sure that my domain is listable, as we publish trade magazines, and the bigger boys are there so I'll just bide my time.
If the abuse you got in the early days is anything like that which I get from companies when I reject a press release for editorial inclusion, then you have my sympathy.

Thanks for your understanding

Today, it must be a very daunting task trying to keep on top of every request to be added to the directory.

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That isn't our objective.

We're a bunch of hobbyists building and maintaining a directory - which is not at all the same thing as providing a listing service for website owners . Many websites that would add value to our directory are never suggested to us at all and so we go out and find them. (I'm a Regional editor and I note down URLs from trucks and store fronts for example). At the other end of the spectrum, some of our most repetitive suggesters have websites of the sort that we don't want to list at all.

rogerlindley said:

I always thought that Alta Vista, and other search engines used DMOZ.

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That may be true, but DMOZ does not use them.

felixm said:

I submitted my business website to dmoz months ago, but it still does not show up on the site. Can someone please tell me what that problem is?
The url is <URL removed per forum ToS> it's been a while since I submitted it and nothing has happend. Please help me.

<email removed for user's sake>

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Isn't that the million dollar question any website owner wants to know.

forthofer said:

Isn't that the million dollar question any website owner wants to know.

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I suggest that the question is: What more can I do to increase traffic to my site? Once a website owner hits the submit button at DMOZ, that task is done and the effective website owner moves on to the next task that may result in a positive impact.

Isn't that the million dollar question any website owner wants to know.

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The fact that dmoz.org is one single website, leads people to think there's one single answer.

But there isn't a single answer, and usually there can't be.

Any website owner can ask me (an ordinary surfer) why I didn't visit that site this week. (It's only a sixty-four-cent question, of course.) The answer is of the form "I was on some other site, or experiencing real life."

Now suppose I start editing at the ODP. Ask me the same question, and ... get the same answer.

But at the ODP, a site doesn't HAVE to be visited by me, to be listed. Thousands of other editors could have visited it. And each one of them could be asked the same question, and would have to give the same answer. They too visit other sites; they too experience real life.

So, there may be a million-dollar question, but the answer has a thousand parts. Nobody can answer more than one of those parts, and no single part is useful to the website owner.

In fact, no single part is useful to anyone but the person who can answer it...and, when you think about it, no single part is anybody else's business!

A lot of people seem to think the ODP is a kind of market research organization: its mission is to find out what sites, or kind of sites its editors visit--and report that to marketing corporations. But it's not anything like that, and it doesn't DO any of that. In fact, it's the exact opposite: volunteer confidentiality is EXTREMELY important.

Think of it like a beehive near a clover patch: how do you tell which clover blossoms will be visited? How can you know that some clover blossom wasn't visited, because a flap of a fruit fly's wings affected the air currents in a neighboring hemisphere, so the bee wobbled to the next blossom over?

hutcheson said:

Think of it like a beehive near a clover patch: how do you tell which clover blossoms will be visited? How can you know that some clover blossom wasn't visited, because a flap of a fruit fly's wings affected the air currents in a neighboring hemisphere, so the bee wobbled to the next blossom over?

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Meaning, suggesters need to improve first their websites, reach the standards of DMOZ, before suggesting. This way, they will get bigger possibility to get listed. But since "air currents are affecting the neighboring hemisphere," it's either you or the other blossom is picked by the bee, depending on the effect of air currents to you, the other blossoms, and the bee.

If DMOZ listed the other sites rather than your site, or haven't yet checked your site, site owners can always work to get the bigger pie off DMOZ to get better ranking. Once you're up there, you might as well get a piece of DMOZ pie. But how would a site owner know when they should suggest their site again in DMOZ? How long after the first attempt?