Update to a Category

I submitted a site to a Category several months ago and have been eagerly watching the category. At that time the last update to the category was performed some time in August 2006 For a couple weeks the last update info at the bottom of the page has been blank. Today the category was updated and 3 sites were removed. Unfortunately, my site was not added.

I guess my question concerns whether all updates to a category are done at one time. For example, is it possible old listings in the category were being removed and an editor will now come through and add new ones?

Also what does it mean when the update info at the bottom of a category page is blank?

Thanks
05cummins

Update requests stand out, catch our eyes very quickly, and as they are usually quickly resolved, yes, we try to do them first, or at least, I do. And, yes, when I'm working on those, that's usually all I do at that moment because they're scattered around over a wide area. (if you're talking about a site update)

Sorry, I see you are talking about a category update, , I've been doing site update requests all day, so I've been in and out of a lot of categories.

It's very likely those 3 listings were removed by a tool that hunts down bad urls, and placed them into our unreviewed until an editor can investigate them, see if they are really gone, and try to find the new url, if one exists.

There may not have been a human editor visiting that category yet. Please continue being patient, until an editor in that area can review it.

I'm not sure about your last question, someone else will have to answer that (and we'll both learn) .

No, updates are NEVER done all at once. They're done, one at a time, in no predictable order, and at no consistent or predictable rate. As far as "all" updates to a category, we won't know whether we've gotten them all until we get to the end of the internet. Editors tend to do the "easy" ones first -- update suggestions that provide enough information for the editor to do a quick review looking for a particular datum for a yes/no decision are the quickest.

"Site down" is about as quick a check as one could hope for. Deeplinks to highly authoritative sites, businesses in the editor's own neighborhood (where he can easily spot false addresses), and small tightly focussed apparently-unique sites in small categories (found from Google or the suggestion pool) are other quick-and-easy reviews.

But there's no rule against (and every encouragement for) an editor doing deep searches to try to find all the relevant sites. That would tend to mean a slower pace of site additions -- it takes more work for an editor to do that. But sometimes we LIKE to do that, and it's GOOD for surfers that that be done.

On the other question, my guess is that a blank update date at the bottom of the category page is part of the remaining holdover from the Perfect Storm last year -- we know the databases aren't fully recovered.