I'm feeling rejected.

We launched our website in March 2006. It was designed to provide a lot of useful and needed content about Mexico. The primary design was for content but attention was paid to search engine rules.
Two major search engines cannot/will not crawl our site and will only say "we may have violated their rules" which I assume is a rejection. As we are not listed in DMOZ, I assume that could be for the same reason.
I have had a U.S. and a Canadian designer check our site and it came up "squeaky clean".We have done everything we can to try to find out what the problem is and have come up blank.
In our research, we found a negative search result related to "hijacking" (whatever that is) mentioning our URL back in 2003. We did not purchase our URL until January of 2006 (from a domain seller).

Is it possible that we are being penalised for something that was done before we bought the URL and, if so, how long could it last. Is there any way we can overcome this problem. We are getting great feedback from people using our site, "it's the best site on the web--- about Mexico" (quote!) but how do we get this message to those who review it for listing?
I hope this is appropriate for this forum. I really would like some advice. Thanks, Ray

We can't give you specific information regarding the status of your site but, if you only bought the domain in January, it would be reasonable (if you suspect that previous owners may have been doing something they shouldn't have) to resubmit and add a little note in square braces at the end [...] to indicate that you only bought the site recently.

Nobody is talking about penalties, because we really don't have any way of penalizing a site. One might argue that we can "reward" a site (by giving it a listing for a time), but absence of reward simply isn't penalty: it is manipulative and deceitful to call it one.

But we don't even think about "rewarding" sites, still less of rewarding SEO professionals. We think of serving surfers by finding the unique content. What the site deserves is irrelevant. Still more so is what any person (associated with the site or not) deserves.

What you're doing is equivalent to whining about the state department of transportation having it in for you, just because they were doing road construction when you went on a holiday.

Now, if you had wanted to deal with reality, you could have asked yourself, "are there a lot, an <expletive deleted> LOT of tourist sites on Mexico?" (and you could have answered that by visiting Google.) And then you could have asked yourself, "is there any way that an editor could recognize this site is the best without looking at it AND ALL THE OTHER SITES first?" (and if you aren't up on algorithm design, I'll tell you the answer is "no".)

Then you could look at things from the editor's viewpoint, and ask yourself if there was such a shortage of good travel sites about Mexico that the most important thing to do was look for more of them.

Those three bits of information would tell you something about how long you would expect to wait before the site is reviewed.

It might help to mention that in heavily-spam-ridden categories, ordinary site submittals are as valuable a recommendation as MSN search results or bulk e-mails -- that is, on the average they're significantly better that random at picking out the poorest sites. Which should tell you what kind of priority editors would place on such sites.

Then you could ask yourself, "with the number of affiliate-spam travel sites out there, how long can I expect a visitor (such as an ODP editor) to poke through advertisements looking for unique content?" (I'm sure you can figure out that it won't be long, but I can tell you that you can expect the time to be measured in seconds.)

So that gives you another question to ask yourself: "Can a new, casual visitor to my site spot the navigation to its unique features within a matter of 20-30 seconds, or in that time would the main page still be downloading gratuitous graphics and incendiary flash trash?"

I've given hints where I can, but most of the answers you can tell for yourself already, better than an editor could tell even after 15 minutes' site review.

OK, given realistic expectations, is there anything you can DO?

Site design: the front page should be clean, simple, <blindingly> fast-loading, and devoted to navigation to the most significant content on the site. Not everybody has broadband internet, even in the United States! The inner content and navigation should receive almost as much design as the content itself. The chances of your navigation being well-designed for both first-timers and repeat visitors is, well, infinitesimal. Test. Get some first-time visitors, and ask them to find things on the site.

Do or get professional (competent, as opposed to mercenary) website promotion. Think out of the internet box: get the URL in printed sources. Get links not just from anyone who'll give links, but from websites whose links a visitor is actually likely to follow. (That's where we find most of the good travel sites, and therefore that's where we'll be looking for more good travel sites!)

Build content -- so many internet marketroid jerks build a site just until it's established, then let its content rot while they start some other scam. (1) Build the kind of content that you are one in a million people on earth that has the necessary knowledge and experience. (2) Every website is personal: let your personality flow through. (3) Figure on a website that you could spend five to ten years building, otherwise why are we wasting OUR time listing it only to have to delete it again?

Oh, and if you bought the domain name a year ago, and there is not one but two major search engines that won't spider it, invest $500.00 or so to fix that problem (that is, pay $6.95 to get a new domain name, then pay someone $493.05 to cart the old name away to a toxic waste landfill. Life just isn't long enough to try to clean up after a thoroughgoing affiliate-scum webmaster.)

To Motsa,
Thanks for the advice. We have re-submitted as you recomended. Hopefully this will make a difference.
Ray

To Hutcheson,
Thank you so mutch for the comments. I have to admit that we really do not have a good understanding of what an Editor goes through each day when looking at many sites and having to evaluate them. I would think it is an arduous task.
I believe our site is designed to be "new visitor friendly" and has easy navigation. We spent quite some time before launch having new visitors look at it and they gave us good comments which we incorporated. I do appreciate your comments on getting our URL in print sources. We have hired a proffessional writer to do just that. We are also pursuing quality links.
We do plan on developing the site over a long term period and adding lots more relevant content including a news letter, RSS feed and a blog site for our clients. We are in this for the long run.
As for your last comment, we are going to try to resolve the issue and have 2 professionals checking it out. I do make you a promise. If we cannot resolve the issue, I will gladly spend the $500.00 and find the deepest most toxic waste landfill available and bury it deep.
Again, thanks for your help and we'll do whatever we can.
Ray

>> I would think it is an arduous task. <<

It only becomes arduous if you let it do so. Therefore you'll find most editors editing where they enjoy it (so that's often away from spam-laden categories), and in a way that makes it interesting (like finding sites elsewhere than the generally low-quality suggestion heap).