Why was my site not listed

Hello. I was wondering if you could help me. I submitted my site http://www.looking4limos.com/pennsylvania-limos.php. According to my log files, it was checked out by an editor, but not listed. Any ideas why that might be? Also have the same problem with the Illinois and Tennessee pages. Since all the pages have different content on them, I thought maybe I could submit each state to it's respectable directory for Limos. Thanks for your help. I appreciate it.

Please post in the Site Submission Status forum, and carefully follow the instructions about specifying the category to which you submiited.

In general, ignore your site logs regarding editor visits - it could mean so many different things, it cannot tell you anything about reviews, acceptance, denial or anything else.

We rarely list deep links. We're a directory, not a search engine . Our submission guidelines (which you agreed you'd read and accepted at submission time) explain this.

If that's the case, why are there so many links to amazon.com and ebay.com when I type those search terms in? It looks as if you give more consideration to the more popular sites. I'm not in any way tring to be rude here, I'm just kind of curious. It looks as if it's a double standard. Forgive my being blunt, but that's they way it appears.

The adjective used was "rarely".

Listing sites or not, and listing deeplinks or not, are left up to editorial discretion, based on their opinion of how the site meets the ODP guidelines for listing. There are very few absolute mandates that need to be stuck to.

You will tend to see more deeplinks in the non-commercial area of the directory. Btw, i did a search on dmoz.org for ebay.com and ebay and it returned 0 results. I did a search for Amazon.com and it came back with a bunch of interviews and alot of book reviews. Are you sure you are searching dmoz.org and not Google. We are not Google you know?

I understand dmoz is not google. Here's the search string I used "http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=ebay.com" to find the listings. So if there is not mandate for each editor, why do some list and some don't? Most of the directories those were submitted to had no editors, so I imagine a top level editor went through them. Sir(s) and/or madam(s), I'm not trying to be rude, I just don't understand how some editors can be so arbitrary about listing and some aren't. Is it luck of the draw? If I get an editor that believes that page would benefit his or her category, it stands a chance to be listed. If that's the case, it kind of seems like a double standard as I said before. I am just trying to understand why these pages were rejected. If I was wrong in assuming that they could be, I would be more than happy to admit it. That's why I submitted them to the state level. Each state has many cities (incorporated on same page, at the top, which then moves the user down to the actual city), so it didn't make any sense to me to submit one for each city. I thought I had used good judgement when I submitted, but it appears I didn't. Thank you for your patience and understanding. I appreciate your input.

Because there are 97 thousand other people that like to deeplink every state page of there limo rental/hotel search/real estate/insurance services/etc. We are a human edited directory so we are not going to list these deeplinks because we have to manually look at them. We list the top level domain - that is it. It is a matter of manpower - imho.

Also, you would be surprised how many people actually go down to the city and submit all of those. Someone has to go through all those - and in this case delete them. What if we actually listed them? Nobody would have any time do anything else.

It might not make that much sense looking at it from the submitter point of view but it is makes a whole lot of sense from this side - the human volunteer editor Point of View.

My 2 cents.

And please note that it is neither "arbitrary" nor "luck". We have a publicly-available set of guidelines for listing sites in the directory, and each editor is empowered to determine whether a particular site (or deeplink) meets those guidelines (that, after all, is the principle of a human-edited directory).

Deeplinks, especially, are treated with a great deal of caution, especially when it comes to businesses.

I know this doesn't fit how you would like to have your site listed - I am trying to explain the decision process, not justify it one way or the other.

why are there so many links to amazon.com and ebay.com when I type those search terms in? It looks as if you give more consideration to the more popular sites.

Click to expand...

Questions like this have come up before, but I don't believe we have ever given the most obvious answer. The correlation between our number of links and popularity of the site is often looked at two ways:

1. The site is popular, so we must favor popular sites.
2. We favored the site, and that's why it's popular (perceived boost from dmoz.org listings).

In fact, though, neither of these things are true in most cases. Unique and useful content is the true correlation between the two.

The sites are full of unique content on several subjects, and they are a useful resource in many categories, improving the amount of unique links within those categories enough to justify deeplinking.

and

The sites are full of unique content on several subjects, and they are a useful resource to many people no matter what subject they are interested in, therefore people are happy with them and they become popular.

ODP editors are hard to please. We see a lot more of the Internet than most people, so we see the best and worst of the resources out there. There's a lot to choose from when adding a link to a category, and there's not enough time to link everything, so the sites at the "best" end of that spectrum are more likely to be listed, and deeplinked.

I'm never happier than when I find a great site that can be deeplinked. That means a lot of useful links for the review time of one. But the more great sites there are, the higher that bar gets.

So it all comes down to our mantra "unique content", in the end, which is why readers of this forum see it so often.