satus of www.new-york-hotels.bz

Hello. I submitted www.new-york-hotels.bz to this catagory http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/New_York/Travel_and_Tourism/Lodging/ on 12/9/03. Could you please tell me the status? Thank you.

Rejected. See our guidelines for the reasons.

Thank you for the quick response. I am assuming that we were rejected because we do a lot of affiliate marketing, in particluar, most of the descriptions of our hotels come from our affiliate partner. I noticed on the page that you refered me to it says:

General rule of thumb: Look at the content on the site, mentally blocking out all affiliate links. If the remaining information is original and valuable informational content that contributes something unique to the category's subject, the site may be a good candidate for the ODP. If the remaining content is poor, minimal, or copied from some other site, then the site is not a good candidate for the ODP.

Does this imply that we were rejected because our content (not including the hotel listings) was insufficient to warrant inclusion? Please let me know as I am interested in improving our site so that it meets with DMOZ guidelines. Thank you.

GoogleFish

The forum guidelines prevent editors from discussing the specifics of why a site was rejected. Sorry if this does not seem to be very helpful but that is the way the forum operates. The link given by windharp will outline the likely possibilities.

We can do nothing but read the guidelines to you, I'm afraid. And you have done a really good job of that yourself. It is forum policy not to go into specifics about why a particular site was not chosen to be listed.

I have (deliberately) not looked at the site, so that I can give generic advice. Once you block out any affiliate links, you need to ask yourself whether what you have left is really useful and not available anywhere else. The bar is set high, because there are lots of travel and booking-related sites out there. And we're not talking word-for-word copies (i.e. it is unique, I changed one word) - it has to be SUBSTANTIALLY better. Howvere, at the end of the day, what counts is the opniong of the reviewing editor, so it's difficult to come up with hard-and-fast rules.

Hope this helps.