How to get a site removed

I have seen a site in the ODP that has been an asp exception error for at least a year. Can they be removed. they have 3 links in the ODP. The URL is www.txwcadvisor.com. The site serves no purpose and is ranking well in Google only because of this link.

Only two links were found, but they were taken down by a fellow editor today.

I'll try to ignore the tone of the post, and the irrelevant guff about Google, and just say:

Thank you for the contribution to the ODP quality. If you have any more such issues, please take them to our "Abuse Reporting" forum here, where there is a thread just for them. Simple cases (like this one ) get handled very quickly -- often within a few hours.

Save your time, and ours, by omitting the irrelevant bits about "how long it's been" or "how much it affects Google." We just focus on making today's ODP better than yesterdays, and anything that contributes to that is great, regardless of what other effects it has, or how old the problem is.

Well hutcheson, I'm glad to see that I am not the only one that you brow beat on these forums. Not to worry fewsilly these forums are also visited by concerned editors who aren't concerned with making you feel stupid or "irrelevant", as that word seems to be coined quite often by hutcheson...

Nope, Hutcheson is just following the rules, and those rules are very clear, and have been already spelled out in great detail elsewhere.

In your very long thread he has stated that we DO NOT CARE what effect our directory listings have on search engine results, and he makes exactly the same point, here, again; and I'll add the same again too. We only care about the overall quality of the directory.

I would say that he is being very consistent in his approach. I am thinking that you'd complain even more loudly about perceived "injustice" if he had said something different here to what was said (over and over and over again) in your thread.

Oh, come on, LOWRY, lets get real. You started the tone in your original thread and so did fewsilly in this thread. Sheesh!

I am very sorry I was not trying to take any tone. I just wanted to give all the information needed. If a site just had an ASP error for a week I don't think they should be taken down. Also I did not think it was abuse I am sure the guy just went out of business and has just not thgought about ODP he may not have even asked to be there. I did not know I just had to mention it I thought there needed to be more of a justification to remove something.

Your point about the temporary outage is well-taken. (Our automated bad-links checker gives a site two chances, a week apart, before marking it for editors to check a third time.)

Oddly enough, I don't get an ASP activation error, but then I'm using a real, industrial-strength browser -- so they may be doing some kind of brain-damaged browser-spoofing. I get a "coming soon" screen, but I know very well that as developers we "call all times soon.")

And actually, I didn't delete the site, just moved it back to Unreviewed for that very reason.

You get the ASP error if you go to "http://www.txwcadvisor.com" (no dot at end of URL)

You get the "coming soon" page if you go to "http://www.txwcadvisor.com." (with dot), which is what happens if you click on the link in the top post of this thread.

Just a quick addition to what Hutcheson and Giz have said: it may seem cold or unnecessarily mean of us to keep stating that we don't care about how our actions affect Google, especially in light of the fact that Google is important to people's livelihoods. However, in fact it is neither cold nor mean: it's the law. Editors are NOT PERMITTED to make editing decisions based on how it will affect Google, or how it will affect individual webmasters' finances. This would be bias on our part. We not only don't care (which we don't, or we wouldn't be editing here), but we are explicitly forbidden from doing it.

So every time a submitter says "Please do this to improve my Google ranking"--or even worse, "Please do this and I will give you $20"--somebody HAS to state "we don't consider that when we're editing." If we don't state that, 20 zillion webmasters would be either trying to use such methods to get listings, or accusing us of doing it.

I know you may not like hearing that we don't care about things that matter a lot to you, but we CAN'T care. It's the only way for us to do our job fairly.

Nicely put Flicker,

Those of us on the outside would much rather hear "We cannot assist you with your problem as it is not permitted by our guidelines" rather than, "your issue is irrelevant and we do not care" Its all a simple matter of how an editor addresses an issue. Some editors should try to assist those who have issues here and others are not well equiped to deal with the human side of this forum. It's so easy to make people feel comfortable with their inquiry, I don't know why people go out of their way to make the lines of communication difficult...

I think that you will find, on the whole, that editors generally respond in the tone set by the person making the query.