Our site has been removed

I had submitted an update to our description last week after noticing Google was using the inaccurate DMOZ description for our company. Today I noticed there was no editor listed for the category we're in so I attempted to contact the editor one level above - his contact page returned an error message. I went another level above that editor and sent a note asking if he could help. Two hours later I notice our site has been removed from DMOZ.

This jogged my memory, I remember now the diatribe I received in an email from this same editor when I contacted him back in 2006 because our site had been submitted eight months earlier and was never listed. It was a nice little rant accusing me of trying to leapfrog other sites (there are only 66 in our category), but he listed our site anyway. But now this same person seems to have removed our site. I guess this is one way to get Google to stop using the DMOZ description. If I had discovered the noodp meta tag a few hours earlier I wouldn't have written. Whatever.

It's a beautiful day here and I'm going for a bike ride. Maybe some of the editors on here should try doing the same, there seems to be an awful lot of anger in this community.

Take care.

Today I noticed there was no editor listed for the category we're in so I attempted to contact the editor one level above - his contact page returned an error message. I went another level above that editor and sent a note asking if he could help. Two hours later I notice our site has been removed from DMOZ.

Click to expand...

Most probably the 2 events are not related at all.
If you submitted an update request the most likely cause your site isn't listed anymore is either
- the site isn't listable anymore (the contents changed or our guidelines about which sites we want list changed)
- the site is moved to another category and is now waiting review there (most probably because the contents changed)

It seems the site was moved to a dead category, and the description has gone unchanged. Real nice move, you guys crack me up. I see in our web analytics that a DMOZ editor came in from Uppsala, Sweden, so I guess it was him. Have a nice day.

This is an excellent illustration of why you should not trust editor logs, I guess. I'm going to go out on a limb here and tell you exactly what happened: Because I'm a moderator here I can see your email address in your profile, and because I'm curious about what had happened, I checked that domain to see if it was the site you were asking about. It was listed in the directory, in a category where it had been for a couple of months or so. Until a few days ago, it was also listed in the parent category of the current category, but when you submitted your update request, an editor (not me ) discovered the double listing and removed the one in the less specific category.

What do you mean by "dead category"? There is no such thing - all categories in the Open Directory are live. A site should never be listed both in a category and its parent category, but for various reasons, that can happen anyway by mistake - and when we discover it, the less appropriate listing is removed. That's part of the general directory maintenance which we do every day.

So the hit you saw in your logs was from me, and I've never edited your site in any way.

By dead category I meant one with less relevance to our business. Virtually every competitor of ours is in the directory you refer to as the "parent" directory. Where we are now is not indicative of our complete service offerings, someone taking even a quick glance at our home page would be able to discern that. It's also worth noting that even though this editor chose to remove us from the "parent" directory he chose not to update our description with the more accurate one I had submitted. So as it as it stands now, our description is still inaccurate _and_ we're in a category we really don't belong in.

My main concern here was Google using the inaccurate DMOZ description on certain search results. We've manage to achieve page 1 results on Google for a number of key terms but the impact was no doubt diminished by having an inaccurate site description displayed, thus costing us traffic. I chose to add the noodp meta tag rather than continue to pursue this. I'm done typing on this one.

Cheers.