One sentence explanation will be useful

I think that one sentence explanation about the reasons of the rejection will be useful and help webmasters to make corrections and diminish the traffic of this forum.

It will also tell the spammers how we spotted them, thus enabling them to hide that particular thing next time they submit. That's why specific reasons for rejection aren't given.

If you build a useful site with a decent quantity of unique content, i.e. you've written it yourself , there's hardly ever a reason for rejection. I'm not quite sure why that's so difficult to understand.

strca said:

I think that one sentence explanation about the reasons of the rejection will be useful and help webmasters to make corrections and diminish the traffic of this forum.

Click to expand...

OK, let try to write this sentence.

'The site wasn't included because it either violated ODP rules (read the guidelines, especially the rules about which sites won't be included) or it doesn't have enough unique content.'

I think this covers 99% of all rejections.

On the rare cases that we've rejected something for a reason the webmaster actually could fix--say, all of the links are broken--we usually do tell them. In nearly every case in which I reject a site, however, it's due to a lack of unique and original content. (Either because the information on the site is copied from elsewhere, the URL is a mirror or deeplink of another of the webmaster's URLs which we have already listed, the site is an affiliate seller, doorway or lead generator without unique products of its own, or some other violation of our submission guidelines; or just because the site is under construction, the forum has two posts in it, and there's only one line of text.)

If that's the case, as it nearly always is, then the ONLY thing the webmaster could do to "correct" the problem is to add unique and original content. Since that's the same advice I would give to a person WITHOUT any website at ALL yet, there wouldn't be much point in saying so. We used to do more of this in this forum, in fact, and all it really did was invite a lot of arguing about how unique the color scheme on mirror #451 is, how great the one sentence of text is, or why we're fools not to list affiliate sites and doorway and lead generators. The fact is, it's stated very clearly in our submission guidelines what kind of sites we are looking for and which kinds we are not. Anyone who reads them will already know why we have declined to list their site. Talking about it in more depth than that seems to create more ill will than good, frankly.

Sometimes I would tell a site owner that the content was proably ok, but due to errors in the site design and menu, the content was not reachable, but this could be fixed by redesigning the site. But that ended up in the site owner "defending" his site against what he perceived as a personal "attack" on its design.

We do tend to tell someone that the site was removed since it was not accessable several times, due to possible problems with the ISP server being down, but even these sometimes turn into arguments.

So I think we avoid being specific.

strca, sites aren't rejected because webmasters make "mistakes" that could be "corrected". They are nearly always rejected because webmasters fail to supply content.

So your "goal" of "helping webmasters" really corresponds not only to nothing in the ODP mission but to nothing whatsoever in reality.

I apologise for needing three sentences to reply. Take breaks as necessary when reading.