Our site is not listed - submited half year ago

Hi there,

I have submitted our site - www.kitchenniche.ca - about a half a year ago and was told that the site would be listed in about 2 - 3 month at the latest.

I have no idea why my site is not listed since it is a usual online shop as alike thousands of others.

Does somebody of you have an idea what the problem could be?

Many thanks in advance

Sandra

Whoever todl you that your site would be listed in two to three months was significantly incorrect, and I am confident that you were not given that advice in this forum, for any editor offering such advice would have ben pummeled into dust by his or her peers.

Our FAQ details the timelines, wich can exceed three years.

We do not give status checks any more, and there is a link to that announcement in my signature block.

that fact that you have not been listed is, in our view, not a problem, although from your view we can see how it might seem that way. The ODP is not a listing service for webmasters. We accept suggestions from non-editors, such as yourself, and we will probably, eventally, get to all such suggestions, but they are really only one (fairly poor) source of potential listings for us, and we do not heavily rely upon them in our directory building efforts.

Why, then do we accept suggestions if we are not willing to get on them right away? Good question. My personal opinion is that many editors would like to do away with suggestions entirely, but for the realization that once we closed off suggestions we would catch even more "what for" that we do now, because it is less damning to be wrongly perceived as slow and inefficient, than it is to be wrongly perceived as being unable to accept community input.

In any event, if you have submitted your site, that is really all that you can do. Suggestions don't expire, they don't get tossed into the recycle bin if we don't look at them in a given period of time, they just sit there, patiently waiting for an editor to show enough interest to take a peek.

You did say that your site is a usual online shop as alike thousands of others. I certainly hope that this is not the case, as we seek out unique content, and if your site is just the same as thousands of others, we would have little motivation in listing it. I hope that was simply verbal shorthand and not a true representation of your site. Oh my!

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.

When i said my site is an online shop like thousand others i didn't mean the site is like thousand others, i meant it is an "online shop" and there are thousand others of them in dmoz, that's what i meant.

Anyways, thanks a lot for taking the time to answer my question.

Sandra

Good! I hoped that was the case.

There are indeed thousands of online shops, hundreds of which shouldn't be listed -- and it's easy to find sites that are worse than yours already listed.

Think of it like a lottery. Twenty million sites waiting to be reviewed, editors rummage through the tiles looking for plausible sites to review ... but that part of the process is near-as-no-never-mind random.

So how long will it take? How many tickets do you have to buy to win the lottery?

I caution you that each extra submittal does NOT represent a ticket. All your ODP submittals are one ticket (or less, if there are too many of them). Good placement in Google or other search engines is a kind of ticket. Your URL on business card, panel truck window, newspaper or magazine ad -- is a kind of ticket. And so on.

The second part of the question -- how to make your ticket look plausible -- is trickier. You have to know and explain your business is DIFFERENT from all others. Because no editor is likely to think "wow, the ODP doesn't have enough online stores, I'll go find some more." Editor thinking is more likely to run along the lines of "the ODP needs more sites about [this], or selling [that]..."

Lottery ticket, uhhh

Hutcheson let me ask you, do you think we have a better change to get listed by not summiting at all?

WOPR said:

The only way to win is not to play.

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Perhaps. Submitting once or perhaps twice will help. Submitting dozens of times to different categories will hurt.

I heard someone metion that editors do not benefit from listing or not listing a site, maybe not the editors, but someone out there does.

The people who benefit are the surfers who use and trust our data.

If you go to a search engine and type in "Miami, Florida" you'll get 10 of thousands of hits, many of which are sites that don't really exists, but simply generate a dynamic page to match any search term.

If you go to the ODP and browse within our Regional/ tree to Miami, Florida you'll find real sites, sorted by category, all with local relevance, all of which have been vetted by a human being.

That, my friend,is the value of what we do, and what inspires us to keep on doing it. No vast right/left wing conspiracy, just an international group of editors cataloging the web for the better good of all, and unlike many other directories there is no way to buy a listing. Which means that the hobbyist with a real intersting site, who shares teir passion, on Tripod or Geocities has just as much change of being listed as does someone with an online business who is trying to make money.

Ricardo Ramirez said:

I heard someone metion that editors do not benefit from listing or not listing a site, maybe not the editors, but someone out there does.

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Yes the average websurfer benefits greatly which is of course our only concern.

Ricardo Ramirez said:

Lottery ticket, uhhh
Hutcheson let me ask you, do you think we have a better change to get listed by not summiting at all?

Click to expand...

A single submission to the proper sub-cat, with a well written and guideline compliant title/description would make a site more attractive to an editor for review and in turn *could* make a review time shorter but there is no guarantee of that. The category might not have an editor currently interested in devoting time there for review so that site could sit and wait, while at the same time an editor on a personal search could discover it on their own add the title and description and list it while it still sits in unreviewed somewhere. So the reallity is that it is just unpredictable which way is faster.

That is a very interesting statement you made there "spectregunner" how ever the Google giant relies on you guys, smaller companies are not getting listed because there are not many editors to review the thousands of categories and feel they are forced to buy the so called "pay-per-click"

But remember, getting listed in the Google SE does not require an ODP listing. Most people (forgive me if you are not among them) do not realize that there are two major parts to Google: the directory and the SE (ignoring all the other parts that are not relevant to the discussion.) While the Google directory uses ODP data, the Google search engine is not reliant on our data feed.

I am really sorry, but I have to disagree with you, Google uses 50% if not more of ODP data on their first page placement.

let me rephrase that, google uses 50% if not more of google directory which they acquire from the ODP data on their first page placement

The purpose of submitting a site to the ODP is to make it easier (that is, more likely) an editor will find it at the appropriate time (that is, when he's looking for that kind of sites.)

Submitting once is EXTREMELY unlikely to cause a DELAY, although it can't be guaranteed to speed things up -- sometimes editors find a site some other way before they notice the submittal.

As for Google's reliance on the ODP, the logic you outline is completely wrong, as you'd have figured out if you'd thought about it from Google's perspective. Suppose -- Google didn't depend on the ODP? Then ... MORE "smaller companies" would be forced to rely on pay-per-click. Google would be richer....

That's obviously not the way Google thinks about it, or they'd have dumped the ODP already.

As for "someone benefiting" from a site listing, well, DUH! Of course I think someone does, or I wouldn't list sites! Like, me -- sometimes I wouldn't remember where I saw that neat site unless I'd added to the appropriate category. (What would have been my bookmarks are in the ODP...) Like, my children, who've been able to find homework help there, when neither Google nor Yahoo would help. Like, people who ask me questions I can't answer -- when I know which ODP category contains links to authoritative sites. Like, surfers I don't even know.

Now, the ODP doesn't help some people. Affiliate webmasters hate us with a passion that passeth understanding. Other commercial (or even nonprofit) webmasters are often frustrated because their particular sites aren't listed. (From our point of view, they already know where the site is, why are they looking in the ODP for it?) And webmasters who DO get listed are (we hear) sometimes surprised and shocked to see how little their listing seemed to help them.

Even surfers are sometimes frustrated enough with the ODP ... to join and improve categories that badly need it. And, when it comes down to it, that's the only kind of frustration that matters, because that's the only kind of frustration that changes anything.

Thank you to all the editors in this forum, and I am sorry that I asked too many questions but we have to learn somewhere and this looks like the forum that answers more accurately than others.

Best Regards to all.

Asking questions is allowed. Learning from the answers is especially appreciated, and all too rare. I know they aren't the answers you want, but ... knowing reality has its own benefits.

I am really sorry, but I have to disagree with you

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You are more than welcome to do so, and I think I speak for every editor when I say that disagreement is fine so long as it remains civil.

Thank you for remaining civil.

Google uses 50% if not more of ODP data on their first page placement.

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This is kind of like saying 50% of parents are men, therefore 50% of men are parents. It might make sense to some, but it's not reality.

I'm not into SEO and know very little about it, but I believe sites in the ODP showing up on G's first page has less to do with an ODP listing and more to do with the site being a content rich source relevant to the topic/search. If a site is listed in the ODP, then an editor found the site informative on a topic, which means the site has content relevant to the topic. It stands to reason that if a SE is worth their salt, they would also place sites that are relevant to a query pretty high in the returns.

The problem is when people think they know something about SEO see a bunch of ODP listed sites showing up on the first page of G's results and think it's the ODP listing that did it.

>> Google uses 50% if not more of ODP data on their first page placement. <<

Maybe it is the other way around? Maybe you're seeing an effect but not the cause, therefore have no idea what caused the effect?

When I wanted to expand a category last year, I did a Google search for some subject then reviewed all of the useful looking sites in the first 50 of the Google search results and added any that were useful. So, most of the first 50 results are in the ODP, but many were in Google first.