Site Removal

I've just read an article about this elsewhere and was so disgusted with Dmoz's policy on it, I felt I had to sign up and comment.

If a site owner no longer wishes to have their site listed in this directory then they should absolutely have the right to had it removed. It is totally irresponsible of the Dmoz or anyone else to harvest information for publication in this way and refuse to accept their responsibility to remove it if required.

How would the Dmoz editors feel if their personal phone number was displayed in graffiti in their town centre? Probably not happy. Your arguement would be that Dmoz displays links to site that are publicly available anyway. Well, your phone number may be in the phone book, but it doesn't necessarily mean you want it painted on a wall somewhere!

There are standards in place using meta tags and robots.txt files to keep search engines out. You should respect this convention accept that in some circumstances, someone may require a website to be available to their customers, but doesn't want it appearing in directories and search engines.

If we were providing a service to website owners, you might have a point - but we aren't. We're providing data to our surfers and downstream data users.

Websites in the public domain are umm in the public domain and there's nothing wrong in linking to them, whatever the owner's opinion about this. To extend that, there's nothing wrong with critiquing them either but we don't. We merely describe the content.

Some owners are unhappy that search engines will sometimes prefer to use our description over the website's metatags. That behaviour can be changed because a few of them, including Google, honour the NOODP metatag.