Re: trouble with submission
A separate issue:
>>i realize this is a competetive category
I wouldn't put it that way. The CATEGORY is not at all competitive. If you actually have a debt consolidation business, it is easy to get a listing. (Some other, commercial directories may even be willing to take money to include multiple doorway pages for the same business, but their ideal is that they allow each business one-listing-in-category.)
The KEYWORDS are very probably competitive at the SEARCH ENGINES. This is a VERY profitable business, like real estate or online porn, so businesses are willing to pay a lot of money to get marketing leads, so they have affiliate programs to increase their visibility in search results. These affiliate doorways are very valuable to the actual D.C. businesses, because they can potentially push their rivals out of site on the search engine results.
But the ODP looks at sites from the viewpoint of the user. If our users can get to ABC Debt Consolidation via their home page, that's good enough. If they can get to DEF DebtCon Inc. via THEIR home page, again, that's good enough. We don't care which one, if either, the user clicks on. We don't care what the search engine does with our results.
Another truth is that ODP gets a great number of site submissions for debt-consolidation affiliate doorways. And, unfortunately for your reputation, and unfortunately for the reputation of actual businesses in this industry, most of the submissions are very devious. Some of these people know that the sites wouldn't be listed if submitted honestly, so our experience is that these sites are generally characterized by great variety of deception. I'm reluctant to describe these techniques in detail (don't want to give you ideas, and especially don't want to tell you which techniques we're not catching yet) but there are indications that the affiliators are giving out advice as to the kind of deceptive information to put on a site to get it listed (that is, at least, if the editor is careless.)
The result is that even legitimate businesses in these areas must be viewed with great suspicion and investigated with great care. And everybody's legitimate websites languish in unreviewed while we're trying to refine the dross out of the unreviewed queue. But perhaps this is what you meant by "competitive category."
