Hi Everyone

Hi Everyone,

May i ask how long it will generally take for quite a niche market for a website to get reviewed?

I am an SEO Proffesional who knows DMOZ holds a lot of weight with the search engines and am here to get a higher understanding of how DMOZ works and why this is the case!

My first question is just general, will come up with better ones soon!

Thanks in advance

May i ask how long it will generally take for quite a niche market for a website to get reviewed?

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It's all rather dependent on if/when an editor decides to do some work in the category for that particular niche. Since our editors are all volunteers who donate their time freely, we essentially allow them to choose when and where they would like to work. (We get a lot of suggestions, so there's always plenty of places with work to be done, not to mention the fact that reviewing public suggestions isn't the only thing that editors can do to help build and maintain the directory.) It's therefore not possible to predict when someone will next be working in a particular place, nor how long a given site is likely to have a wait to be reviewed.

DMOZ holds a lot of weight with the search engines ... why this is the case!

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Search engines make money by attracting users. Presumably a big part of this is down to whether or not they return good sites in their results. If the average site listed in the ODP is 'better' than the average site on the internet, then it would make sense for search engines to give an increased weight to listed sites. Though I believe google has repeatedly said that they don't give any additional credit to ODP-listed sites beyond the standard page-rank boost from the links.

For more information about the ODP, you might like to take a look at the RZ FAQ, and also read our editing guidelines. They might provide answers to some more of the questions you think of.

Welcome, columk, .

May i ask how long it will generally take for quite a niche market for a website to get reviewed?

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There's really no way to predict that as we have roughly 6,000 volunteer editors and some can edit in wide areas of the Directory while others may be limited to one or two very small categories (until they request and are granted other editing permissions).

Also, because editors are volunteers, they edit in areas they are interested in, and they have various amounts of time and desire that they can devote to editing. Some are very active, and others do very little.

To add to that, editing in wide areas of the Directory can be very random. I may work in one state for awhile, and then edit in a different state, and in my case, I don't edit sites by the date of the submission, so a site suggestion may have been waiting one day and get listed, or it may have been waiting several months or years. When you may have 40,000 - 50,000 + site suggestions available over wide areas, it's a little difficult to have any kind of method in choosing where to edit, it's very random.

It's all rather dependent on if/when an editor decides to do some work in the category for that particular niche. Since our editors are all volunteers who donate their time freely, we essentially allow them to choose when and where they would like to work. (We get a lot of suggestions, so there's always plenty of places with work to be done, not to mention the fact that reviewing public suggestions isn't the only thing that editors can do to help build and maintain the directory.) It's therefore not possible to predict when someone will next be working in a particular place, nor how long a given site is likely to have a wait to be reviewed.

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A case in point is my editing tonight. I am allowed to edit in any part of the directory I choose, and since I have a warm spot in my heart for the Regional/ branch of the directory tree, I usually stay fairly close -- and if I wander away, I usually wander back reasonably fast.

Earlier today, I spent some tim working on military aviation caregories, tonight I cleaned out a few dead links in Arizona, jumped over to Delaware (darn, no frequent flyer miles!) and added a few sites that a colleague recently "mined" as part of an informal project to beef up that state. Then I decided to visit a place that has been a vacation destination of mine for many years, Baguio City in the Philippines. I was dismayed to find only one site listed, and a handful awaiting review. I cleaned out the sites that were waiting, mined a handful of others, moved up a level to the Province, rooted out a few dead links that hadn't been found yet, and moved a site into Baguio where it was better suited. Now I'm in here, and while it is bedtime, I may just jump back into Delaware and see what I can do there. Last night, just for kicks, I edited in The Federated States of Micronesia for the very first time. Why? Because it was there and I had never edited there before.

Just a typical night of editing while the spousal unit is asleep.