Questions for moderators/editors

DMOZ moderators/editors:

A few questions (apologies if I have missed these in the Forum archives):

(1) Does (or has) DMOZ/ODP automatically add sites into the Directory? I.e., w/o the usual manual-submission process? Say for sites that are important, like *.edu or *.gov?

(2) Some individuals may apply to become ODP editors for their own personal gain. How are DMOZ/ODP "editor's privileges" handled? E.g., say a category editor wants his/her site listed in the category they edit. Do DMOZ editors enjoy directory-wide privileges (i.e. not just for the category they edit)? How do you police yourselves? ("Privileges" = more likely and/or quicker enlistments into the Directory)

Question (2) was prompted by discussions in other forums such as:

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=196838&page=2

(3) Are there open-to-the-public ODP records for *total* number of Directory listings? E.g., Google keeps a tally on its home page; today it's: "Searching 8,058,044,651 web pages".

(4) Are there open-to-the-public ODP records for when a particular site (or any site) was added to the ODP?

Thanks for any info you can provide.
-KH

1) No, only manual add after review by an editor
2) Editors are allowed to add there own site as long as they do not violate our guidelines (the guidelines are publicly availbale). Most editors have only priveleges in the categories they are listed for (and all categories on a lower level from these). Questions about our internal police can not be answered.
3) No
4) No

Actually, if you're prepared to put in some work, the answer to questions 3 and 4 is yes.

3) Download the routine RDF data dump and count them . Information on the RDF data dump is given within Open Directory Project Help Central

4) Do it again at intervals and compare them.

Neither is a trivial task of course.

KHashmi316 said:

(1) Does (or has) DMOZ/ODP automatically add sites into the Directory? I.e., w/o the usual manual-submission process? Say for sites that are important, like *.edu or *.gov?

Click to expand...

There is no automated process for this, but editors are expected to add sites to the directory that they feel are going to be beneficial to all. We don't expect editors to sit around waiting for people to suggest web sites. If we see something good like a .edu or .gov site that hasn't been added, we will add it.

Thanks to all the editors/moderators who responded to this post.

pvgool said:

2) Editors are allowed to add there own site as long as they do not violate our guidelines (the guidelines are publicly available). Most editors have only priveleges in the categories they are listed for (and all categories on a lower level from these).

Click to expand...

Some of my concerns were based on topical discussion in other forums such as the sitepoint.com forum mentioned in my original post. Specifically, there were allegations of abuse in this category:

http://dmoz.org/Bookmarks/

*Randomly* browsing through various editors' bookmarks has convinced me those allegations were unjustified.

-KH

The Bookmarks category is verboten to search engine spiders, so there's no way to abuse them for SERP purposes. Beyond that, bookmarks are for editors' personal use, and it's hard to make a case for abuse based on what you think someone else might use. At one time it was considered honorable to list your own affiliated sites in your bookmarks. (we have another mechanism for that now)

But it's unlikely that an editor will publicly declare their own affiliations in their bookmarks, and THEN sneakily promote them in the directory -- that would be sort of like a terrorist wearing a "Jihad NOW!" t-shirt onto an airplane.

hutcheson said:

The Bookmarks category is verboten to search engine spiders, so there's no way to abuse them for SERP purposes.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure about this.

First, there is no "<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">" tag in the header of /Bookmarks.

Second, I "discovered" the /Bookmarks category by doing a run-of-the-mill Google search for a randomly-chosen ODP editor. The results led me to this directory:

http://dmoz.org/profiles/

On that editor's profile page, there was a link to his/her Bookmarks page.

-KH

The search engine spider block is in the robots.txt file, not the META tag: like this:

User-agent: *
...
Disallow: /editors/

The profiles are, as you can check, not blocked -- and any links directly there can be traversed. (Obviously editors could theoretically abuse their PROFILES, and that has even happened once or twice.) But -- since the target of THIS link is blocked by robots.txt, then Googlebot and other honest spiders won't look at it.

hutcheson said:

The search engine spider block is in the robots.txt file, not the META tag: like this:

User-agent: *
...
Disallow: /editors/

Click to expand...

Thx for that clarification. I feel a bit foolish for the original query because several of my sites use the robots.txt file for (dis)allowing various bots and crawlers. Lately, I've switched to the META tag because it's easier for some of our CMS editors, who only have access to our sites' HTML files.

-KH