Not a Happy Bunny

Hi ODP Staff,

Can you answer me this please.

I have seen some of my competitors get listed in ODP in the correct catagory as i want to be listed in. no problem there i here you say. Well after a bit of digging around i notice that some domain names are not only younger than mine, have very similar titles and descriptions but also happen to be bigger more wealthy companies. I submitted well over a year ago and have watched these others jump over me on fresh domain names.

I can confirm that i added my request for listing well before at least two of the mentioned websites even existed yet they now sit alongside the rest of my competitors. That doesnt seem fair.

I spent a good deal of time working on my listing request as per the guidelines, so as per my title of this post i am not a happy bunny.

Could i ask for some postitive feedback please. I do understand that listings are not guarenteed but this does smell fishy!

Thanks.

Ohhhh it just gets better. i have just found a competitor with 2 listings. Is that allowed? I cant get in but my competition gets two bites of the apple......... Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

I'd be extremely surprised if the editors who added those sites were aware those companies were your competitors. I'd be even more surprised if that fact had mattered to them in any way.

And there really isn't an editorial guideline that says "if a site competes with any of these specific sites, it must not be listed twice." There are specific circumstances under which a site can be listed twice (and even submitted twice!), but you don't mention anything that would be relevant to those criteria.

There is absolutely not an editorial guideline that says, "You may not list a site until you've determined that all older sites are already reviewed." I don't know that I've ever checked a site's age before listing it. In fact, I don't believe there's a reliable way of checking a site's age.

I assume you've investigated and are sure of your facts--but, as you see, you've been looking at statistics that no editor will ever have seen, much less considered relevant.

There is one extremely important fact that you mention, though. You said that multiple competitors ARE listed. Which conclusively disproves one theory: it is absolutely certain that no editor is using his position to exclude competitors, because ... competitors are being included. Which is good news (for the directory users, as well as for people who are trying to help build the directory by suggesting sites.

You have some good points and i welcome your posting. Domain name age is easy to check with a whois service, but what i am getting at is "fairness". Surley a site similar to mine that was added after my request shouldnt be approved before. I am pretty much old skool and was using DMOZ way back. I am sure "fairness" was around then.

Please dont take it that i am just having a moan but my niche is pretty well loaded with the big guns and i just want what is fair to us small guns.

Do editors not have the facility to aprove based on the date a request for inclusion was added? While i can see that you may approve of a site over an older request based on your submission guidlines i cant but feel that if this format isnt being followed then i do indeed have a case for unfairness. i am probally not the only one in the same position. I understand that you guys give up your own time to edit for that we should all be very gratefull for.

Please see it from my point of view as a businesss owner trying to earn a living against the big guns.

Surley a site similar to mine that was added after my request shouldnt be approved before.

Click to expand...

Here's the fundamental principle of fairness. Websites should receive the same attention WHETHER OR NOT THEY WERE EVER SUGGESTED.

Suggesting a website doesn't make the site more useful to users--and that is all that matters. Logically, then, whether or not a site has been suggested at all, let alone when it was suggested, shouldn't affect when or how the volunteer reviews it.

People who don't practice SEO, webmasters who never heard of the ODP, have just as much a right to be considered as anyone else. Because the ODP isn't about who knows about us, it's about who we know about.

Suggestions are one of many ways we can find out about sites. But never, NEVER, think they can define what's "fair".

But, suppose they did. Suppose a volunteer spent hundreds or thousands of hours building the directory, added thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of listings, refined techniques and developed a keen nose for finding the most useful sites -- is it fair to tell that volunteer that henceforth, they are only permitted to review sites suggested by people who may have no knowledge of the directory, no interest in its goals, no concern for its mission?

It's not my definition of fair, and if I thought it was the ODP definition of "fair", I (and a few thousand fellow volunteers) would be gone in a New York City nanosecond, trying to contribute to the web somewhere else.

First, we aren't a listing service. We have never claimed to be one, and I've been an editor since 1999.

Submitters tend to view suggestions as a queue - first in, first out. Editors view suggestions as a pool, and the pool can be sorted several different ways. By suggestion date is only one of them. A frequent mistake that submitters make is to keep suggesting their site. If that is done and the pool is sorted by date, the suggestion is pushed to the bottom.

Suggestions aren't even the only source of listings. In many categories, esp. commercial categories, the suggestion pool is a very poor source with the majority of the suggestions consisting of spam and sites which don't belong there. If I have 30 minutes to spend editing, it is frequently a better use of my time to go looking on the Internet for sites to list. Sometimes with limited time, editors "cherry-pick" the suggestion pool and pick the titles and descriptions which show that the submitter took a look at the guidelines and wrote them with a title which is the actual name of the business and a description which describes what is actually on the site, not stating "We are the best site for X, Y, and Z" and which actually restrained themselves from attempting to keyword-stuff the description. It is also possible to spend hours improving a category without even touching a site. There is much more to editing than listing sites.

Regarding your competitor being listed in two categories, under specific conditions, some sites qualify for a listing in a topical category such as Shopping or Business, and another listing in the Regional locality where the brick and mortar site actually exists. We ask as part of the suggestion process that one only suggests to one category, and that is agreed to by the suggester.

The fact that several companies are listed tends to show that sites aren't being eliminated by a competitor. However, if you feel that abuse has occurred, you can submit an abuse report. Go to the category where you suggested your site, and the "Report Abuse" link is at the upper right of the page. Regular editors do not see abuse reports. They can only be seen by editors who have earned community management positions such as metas, and also by staff. Multiple metas look at each abuse report, even if the status hasn't changed to "under investigation."

Since you've already suggested your site, I would recommend that you do not suggest it more than a total of once or twice. Suggesting it multiple times or to multiple categories heads one down the path to what ODP considers a spammer.

But forget "fair". No one person can define "fair" for thousands of people working independently. On the other hand, thousands of people working independently is a pretty fair definition of "random", if you ever need one of those.

Think "practicality". Let's say that we announce, henceforth, all suggestions will be reviewed in order. What would happen?

Before the end of the day, several dozen malicious spammers or devious SERP perps would have built manual or automated networks to start making random suggestions of parked domain names--tens and hundreds and thousands of them.

The next day, the SERP perps would set up their own website--"BUY YOUR OPEN DIRECTORY SITE REVIEW HERE!"

"You can suggest your own site, but, face it, SPAM SCUM OF SIAM has 100,000 site suggestions in front of you, and the volunteers aren't going to work through the backlog for the next 5 years. But we will sell you, for only a bazillion bucks, a parked domain, scheduled to be reviewed next Tuesday, which you can redirect to your site."

None of the volunteers get to do anything useful. All of them are slaves to the SSS (or, perhaps, the Russian Mafia, or the Florida MultiLevel Google-Crashers Corp.)

How many volunteers would stick around, do you think?

onlinepackaging said:

Ohhhh it just gets better. i have just found a competitor with 2 listings. Is that allowed? I cant get in but my competition gets two bites of the apple......... Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Click to expand...

It depends. If you mean that 1 company has 2 of his websites listed in the same category than that is something we do not prefer to happen. Please let us know of such a situation in the Quality Control section of this forum. If you mean that 1 compnay has his 1 websites listed in 2 categories than that might be OK, although we ask people so suggest a website only once editors can decided to list a website more than once.

onlinepackaging said:

You have some good points and i welcome your posting. Domain name age is easy to check with a whois service, but what i am getting at is "fairness". Surley a site similar to mine that was added after my request shouldnt be approved before. I am pretty much old skool and was using DMOZ way back. I am sure "fairness" was around then..

Click to expand...

As age of a website is not something we are interested in when reviewing that website we are not going to check. Each website is reviewed only on what that same website has to offer in content. That is our fairness.

Do editors not have the facility to aprove based on the date a request for inclusion was added? While i can see that you may approve of a site over an older request based on your submission guidlines i cant but feel that if this format isnt being followed then i do indeed have a case for unfairness.

Click to expand...

Each editor can review suggested and not-suggested websites in any order he wants.

Please see it from my point of view as a businesss owner trying to earn a living against the big guns

Click to expand...

I can imagine that you find this important but for us, DMOZ editors, the success of a website/company isn´t.