No sites being listed

I have submitted a number of sites over a year or so and found none of them included in the directory. I can see that in one case other URLs have been added. Is there any reason why they would not be listed. I have followed the rules very carefully.

There are a lot of reasons why any given site has not been listed.
Please see the editing guidelines for a pretty good preview of how we judge sites.
Obviously, sites are constantly being added on a daily -- even hourly basis.

Sites not being listed

I agree with this post, some sites are not being added. I have suggested 1 site and it's been over 6 months. It's just a simple small business site and followed all the suggested guidelines.

Perhaps, if I may suggest, a simple response via email to people that their site has been reviewed and will NOT be submitted will alleviate some of this confusion? OR, perhaps things are just not getting listed/submitted?

Josh Jones

No, we are simply not wasting our time sending such notices. The accomplish nothing from our perspective, and we no longer even consider the suggestion.

spectregunner said:

No, we are simply not wasting our time sending such notices. The accomplish nothing from our perspective, and we no longer even consider the suggestion.

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The problem is that one of the rules is not to duplicate submissions. I'm not too sure when I should resubmit a site or not. A message to state that the submission has been denied even with no reason would be a great help to people. Even if they could not debate the reason why. I have followed the rules on all submissions. I feel from an outside looking in this is a bit of an elitist development rather than open.

I will continue to review the rules again and try and resubmitting the sites.

Good afternoon to both of you, . When you submit to the Directory, you are not requesting a site be listed, as we are not a listing service.

What you are doing is submitting a site suggestion for consideration as a help to us in our efforts to build a collection of sites with unique content (a category) for the benefit of web surfers looking for specific information.

It may take from several days to several years for a volunteer editor to review the suggestions in that particular category. No site has a right to be listed, and not all sites are acceptable, as many will not have the unique content that will add value to a category.

Please submit your suggestion one time, and then walk away and forget about it, it will either be accepted or it won't, and there is nothing more you can do, .

"Open" means that we allow the public to freely suggest sites to us, and that everyone can freely use the data that we collect and organize, it doesn't mean we that we are accountable to them.

Many thanks for your reply crowbar. I understand that a lot of peoples time is put in to this wonderful creation but when peoples hard work is not accepted you will understand that it can be taken very personally.

crowbar said:

It may take from several days to several years for a volunteer editor to review the suggestions in that particular category..

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In the particular category I submitted other business have been added since my submission was made. I guess this means that someone is actively editing that particular category.

crowbar said:

No site has a right to be listed, and not all sites are acceptable, as many will not have the unique content that will add value to a category.

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I understand that a site that I have created doesn't have a right to be listed but it is defiantly unique content as it is the only website for that business.

crowbar said:

"Open" means that we allow the public to freely suggest sites to us, and that everyone can freely use the data that we collect and organize, it doesn't mean we that we are accountable to them.

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It is not a case of been held accountable just a definite receipt of rejection so it is documented. The worrying thing is that this directory is used in many search engines and can greatly affect your listing position. With no documentation of waiting times, rejections and acceptations and the collection of many voluntary workers bias editing could take set. This is concerning to me as it could work on who you know or even worse still, the business I submitted is part of a minority community.

Many thanks for your reply crowbar. I understand that a lot of peoples time is put in to this wonderful creation but when peoples hard work is not accepted you will understand that it can be taken very personally.

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Yes, I think we all understand how much work can go into a website, most editors have websites of one kind or another. I did have a few myself, and one of them was quite extensive, but, I took them down and deleted them from the Directory as being too time consuming and unnecessary for my own local business, .

To be perfectly honest, most site suggestions I personally see, do get listed, but there are parts of the Directory that are real spam magnets for the less than honest, , so much in fact, that editors choose not to edit there at all.

Those same type of people are one of the reasons we don't give feedback to site owners, it becomes a testing mechanism for the unscroupulous, and we are as concerned about protecting the honest site suggester as we are about protecting the integrity of the Directory.

And unfortunately for site owners themselves, our focus is on serving web surfers, the seekers of the information, not the site owners who provide the information.

Most site owners would understandably say that we have it backwards (at least for their purposes), but when you're building a library of books, you don't want all books that were ever published, you want a good assortment of books in every category, so that the library becomes a good source for the seeker of information.

What we ask ourselves is does this site suggestion have some unique content compared to the other sites already listed in that category, and will it add value to the category that will benefit the web surfer.

Here's the truth as I see it from inside the ODP, there are literally tens of thousands of site suggestions, with hundreds more coming in daily. Around 7,000 volunteer editors, with various amounts of time, levels of editing permissions, and various levels of interest, work to build the Directory, and reviewing site suggestions is just one of many things that an editor can choose to work on in the Directory.

So, if a site hasn't been added to the Directory, the very most likely reason is that an editor just hasn't gotten to it yet. All of these other reasons are possible, of course, but not the most likely reason.

Thanks for the explanation

Hi Crowbar,

Thanks for the explanation, I have been submitting our micro business site for over six years and still no listing.

I have considered putting myself up as an editor, but feel that I would then not be able to review and list my own site for ethical reasons.

My concern is the other commercial search engines that rely on ODP for their content, this obviously means that my site will not be found on these engines although i am sure that some scanning of the large search engine occurs to lift the smaller search engine results.

Kind regards,
Flexiscreens

That seems to be the curse (or blessing?) of the ODP. It is supposed to be a library kind of resource, but having a few sites listed here myself I can ensure you that it is not being used by the web surfer much. The traffic coming from the ODP is close to 0. The only exception is the google mirror where sites in popular categories with a high pagerank get a click or two a day - nothing really worth mentioning though.
Of course this is a webmasters view, but I do think it is a valid way to measure the casual surfers interest in the directory. Directory traffic is very low in general, because it's so much easier to feed your topic to google than to browse around.

The current practical purpose of the directory, even if not intended or not much liked, is to act as a quality assurance for search engines. The real benefit for webmasters is the secondary traffic coming from search engines because of a link here (which is mirrored many times across the web).

So like it or not, most people submitting sites are webmasters looking for that benefit and the ODP editors are those making sure the site follows a high quality standard. You are not librarians, you are a very important quality assurance tool. ;-)

Yes, for these reasons the black box system is a bit trying, because those submitting sites do it because they have something to gain. In the early days of the ODP I did just that: I submitted a site and forgot about it. It was a "nice to have" thing. But nowadays a link here has a very real value, probably increasing the volume of submissions and lowering the patience threshold of those submitting sites.

Or course this is a free voluntary service and there is absolutely no right to anything for anyone here, but throwing us a bone could benefit everyone (as I have outlined in my other post, which has not been approved by a moderator yet. )

I have considered putting myself up as an editor, but feel that I would then not be able to review and list my own site for ethical reasons.

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The kind of editors we want, are the kind that can be trusted to treat their own or affiliate sites with the same unbiased fairness as any other site, so yes, an editor can list those sites (or send them to the proper category, if they don't belong in that category), but, they are required to declare all such affiliations.


The library thing was just an attempt to simplify an explanation, analogies usually don't work very well.

We have many webmasters and even some SEO types as editors, so we understand that view, but, I think you have a very good, logical understanding and grasp on the whole thing, Thunderstorm. I can't see a single thing in your post that I disagree with, .

I have tried to get listed for 2 years 10 months. I've spread out a half dozen submissions over six month intervals, mostly due to ignorance, but to no avail.

My site is a card game. I designed the game on a dare. Friends complained that they always had a difficult time playing games online, that downloading and installing software made playing onlines game a pain. So I came up with a way to play games using only your web browser.

Submitting my game to the ODP seemed simple and straight forward. Its design was unique, it gave web surfers exactly what they were searching for without the tricks and gimmicks. The category of card games was surprisingly small and the specific category has only 1 entry, i.e. "online" trick taking card game.

After years of NOT getting listed, I started researching the ODP, search engines, etc. I learned the significance of the ODP and came to appreciate my existing PR without it. I decided to concentrate my efforts on the PR I was getting and in a short time turned a few dozen hits a day into hundreds.

So what happened to getting in the ODP? I have my suspicions, perhaps the monetizing hurts, the play to spiders and crawlers may also hurt, but the essence of my website is the game. That brings me to question for the folks who edit the ODP:

My website is a card game, not simply a web page. How do you all regard such a unique thing?

While there are two dozen sites in the category that merely discuss how to play, the rules, history, etc. My site actually allows you to play the game without downloading or installing. The site is the game. How do you judge that and how can it not be of value to anyone at the ODP in 3 years? In fact, the category appears to have had little oversight in years. Some links to non-existent content, others so old they have no value in todays internet. Still others are deceptive and misleading, you know, the spammy stuff.

What's a unique site to do....

You're probably far too busy to read the FAQ, but it does explain that the usual reason why a listable website isn't listed is because no volunteer has yet volunteered to process it.

Since you've already suggested your website several times, stop doing so now. It serves no useful purpose and can add to our volunteer workload, thus leaving them with less time to process legitimate listing suggestions. We don't tolerate that for long of course and so you're also risking triggering our defence systems.

If a listing for your site is going to happen, it'll happen when it happens. If it isn't, it won't.

jimnoble said:

If a listing for your site is going to happen, it'll happen when it happens. If it isn't, it won't.

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Thanks for your reply Jim.

Context is everything.

I have posted about 8 different sites in the last 4 years, one a university site, the others cafepress.com based shops. Only one has been taken. The 7 or so online shops sell African products and are targeted at different countries.

Regarding the shops, I tried to learn from comparable accepted shops in ODP, regarding descriptions, the Titles and so on. After around 2 submissions, I have basically given up, because I dont see what to do differently or better or what I am doing wrong.

Interestingly, one of the countries concerned has had exactly the same total number X of submitted sites over the last AT LEAST 6 (probably 8, or even many more ) months (just a few hundred, below 400). May be a concidence. Most of the other concerned countries also dont have many links, like those in other continents or elsewhere. [Most the over 50 or so African countries have under 200 links] Anyway, I am sure there are legimitate reasons probably behind all that, but I must say, it's been quite frustrating, probably because I expected too much ..., which would be my problem.

I wonder if the fact that you have seven related sites could have anything to do with it?

Just because you choose to divide your web presence into seven different sites, for reasons that behoove you, does not mean that it behooves the directory, and it does not mean that we would list them.

The different sites are not the same though submitted under different countries, a, d, x, z. They each have patriotic designs that fit the respective countries I thought fit to submit them to. I would not for example submit a site with Mongolian patriotic designs under Peru - unless the mistake is not realizing "patriotic designs" of whichever country belong together - in which case regions/country/a, d, x, z would then be wrong.

Uh huh. Please re-read out what our submission guidelines have to say about submitting related websites and the penalties that can be applied should you ignore them.

Hi Jimnoble

Thanks for taking the time to respond.
With the submission guidelines, do you mean these:

# Do not submit mirror sites. Mirror sites are sites that contain identical content, but have altogether different URLs.
# Do not submit URLs that contain only the same or similar content as other sites you may have listed in the directory. Sites with overlapping and repetitive content are not helpful to users of the directory. Multiple submissions of the same or related sites may result in the exclusion and/or deletion of those and all affiliated sites.

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?

If so, then I am a bit confused. www.cafepress.com allows one to open any number of shops. If I open a shop selling brazilian articles with the shop ID brazilianstuff, its url would be www.cafepress.com/brazilianstuff.
I have given up some shop IDS that are part of the url, because someone somewhere else has taken them up - and definitely selling one or all of the same articles availed by Cafepress.

I may open ANOTHER SEPARATE shop, that could as well be opened by another person in Alaska with the url www.cafepress.com/alaskanstuff ... or even in Japan. They may have no similarity at all. Each shop has its own separate url, description & title. Would the problem here be that the same person owns the 2 shops or that cafepress offers the same articles, like t-shirts, mugs, clocks, etc to the ten's of thousands of its users? ALL sell exactly the same articles, the difference only being the designs they put on them, the way they call their shops & of course the titles & descriptions, keywords & so on!
Would it mean all cafepress shops sell "the same or similar content" and so automatically break those guidelines?
I see many of them dmoz. The url format is www.cafepress.com/myshop

If I submit a shop x selling brazilian stuff, does that condemn the rest of my shops selling NOTHING to do with Brazil, but say Iraq from appearing on DMOZ just because they also have t-shirts & mugs, etc - only that these have the Iraqi flag & other stuff, because it's from the same person? How would an Iraqi find "Iraqi stuff" if it cannot be submitted on a SEPARATE site? If the content, ie. t-shirts & other apparel, mugs, caps, clocks, etc are the problem, because it is the "same" NO CAFEPRESS SHOP qualifies to appear on DMOZ. ALL sell them. Are Cafepress related sites defined as "mirror sites"?

What are "related sites"? Are tens of thousands of users of Cafepress.com or Spreadshirt.com, etc running "related sites" - in which case it would suffice if they submitted them once to dmoz on behalf of all their users?
I dont think so, because .... here are some examples of shops I got using search: http://www.cafepress.com/scottferry , http://www.cafepress.com/srcc , http://www.cafepress.com/fofree and so on

I did not submit those shops at the same time, but successively over many weeks, because it takes time to make each.

Anyway, I just want understand if someone cares why things are like that. If I can see exactly what I'm doing wrong I'm ready to give it another try, so far not yet.

We don't mind listing individual cafepress stores provided that they have exceptionally good content. Few do though.

We do object to listing multiple cafepress websites in common ownership. Do not suggest them.