Why was my site delisted?

Hello DMOZ volunteers, and thank you for taking the time to help another one of the website masses.

In 2004, I created a website dedicated to the benefits of fish oil because I was a nutrition enthusiast. I placed ads on the page for fish oil in order to generate a little money from the site.

In 2005, I discovered DMOZ and submitted my site to Health/Nutrition/Nutrients, and was promptly listed. For the next 3 years, I enjoyed a small trickle of traffic from DMOZ. The visitors were higher quality than most of my traffic, as a significant portion of those visitors left comments, signed up for e-mail updates and would continue to return on a regular basis (I still have regular readers that came in on DMOZ several years ago).

Then sometime this year, my site simply disappeared from the DMOZ category. This was strange since the site had not, in fact, changed at all since its inception (which you can verify on archive.org). I submitted it again to no avail. I contacted a health category editor, who said they couldn't figure out why my site was delisted, except that it had ads (which it always did). I'm pretty sure that having ads isn't grounds for being delisted. The ads are not affiliate links, not deceptive, they're big colorful graphics that say "Advertisement," and they take visitors to another site.

This website has been a labor of love that I have written over 100 articles for, and as a result, Google ranks my site in the top 5. This sends my site far more visitors compared to my DMOZ listing, but as I said the DMOZ visitors were higher-quality, so I would like to reach that audience again.

So why would this site be delisted? And if it was for no *apparent* reason, how do I go about getting back on there?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Websites are delisted for all sorts of reasons - sometimes transiently while they await human re-evaluation (perhaps because of downtime), sometimes permanently because they are discovered to be the sort of website that we don't list.

In the first case, re-suggesting it is uneccessary. In the second case, re-suggesting it is both uneccessary and unwelcome.

This should help you to decide into which class your website falls.

Thanks, Jim

Thanks for taking the time to explain the DMOZ policies. However, I thoroughly reviewed the guidelines before I posted, and none of them seem to apply to my site. This may be why the previous editor I contacted could not explain it.

I can PM you the address if you'd like to verify yourself. Thanks for your help so far.

We don't provide website specific advice here (and I don't do it in private either).

Understood. But does that mean there are no more options for me to resolve this discrepancy?

You don't have standing to define a situation needing resolution--as an interested party, your actions as a website owner to promote your own site are suspect UNLESS you are doing (or have done) the same for other sites.

But what can be done?

If a volunteer editor, that is, a disinterested party, thinks the site is valuable enough to raise the issue in the internal ODP forums--then THAT would be a situation calling for resolution. (That's what the internal forums are for.)

What could YOU do?

You (a webmaster or an anonymous surfer) can suggest any site, just as if it had never been listed. And when you suggest it, make sure to emphasize the unique content it contains in your suggested description. [Why? because one _possible_ cause for removing a listing is that it appears to have insignificant unique content. If the editor knows what to look for, he's more likely to keep looking until he finds whatever passes for unique content, rather than terminating the review just because there's lots of non-unique content. And of course ads are non-unique content by definition.]

The site would be reviewed again, with your suggestion as a starting point, by a volunteer editor. But remember, the main question is never "why not list this site?" That is just triage. The real question is always "why list this site?" and there's only one answer: "because it contains unique information."

Also, you (any surfer, including one who has done website creation) can suggest that ANY topic you're interested in, needs work--and offer to become a volunteer editor do that work. You'd have to show that a significant amount of work needed to be done--that is, find several other sites that should be listed in the category. And you'd have to treat your site "fairly" -- no better than other sites. If you're more interested in the topic than in your website as such, this may be worth considering.

Finally, you (or any surfer) can attempt to document some pattern of bias in the category: "sites advocating halibut liver oil are never listed, all the sites are about shark liver oil" or "all the listed sites contain links to SERP perp Joe Shmoe's site: he seems to be link trading with the directory category" or even "sites claiming fish oil causes cancer, gangrene, and senile dementia are being systematically excluded from consideration." If you find something like that, you can report it as a quality problem (possible abuse.) And an experienced editor will review the category from that perspective. [Be ready to cite sites (plural) as evidence.]

Remember, though, there's hardly ever a "final" resolution--all actions are "interim". Any editor can review any editing action at any time. And in discussions of the current interim best action, consensus won't be prevented by lack of webmaster approval. The surfers always get the final say, and the decision has to be based on ODP guidelines. [And there are good reasons why a site may be "large", "popular", or "helpful" -- and yet not listable.]