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    About DMOZ
    Since 1998, DMOZ has been the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. Supported by AOL, it is constructed and maintained by a passionate, global community of volunteer editors.
    Oct 10th 2008 5:27PM
    What Happens After I Submit my Site to DMOZ?
    One of the most frequently asked questions about DMOZ is what happens once a site is submitted to the directory. To help provide some insight into the review process, editor chaos127 has prepared an excellent and thorough guide to the way in which editors route and review sites.

    Emily

    - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
    Website owners often complain about the time it takes for the sites they suggest to be listed in the Open Directory Project. Indeed, many often assume that their site has been rejected when it doesn't show up within a couple of weeks. Instead, it is far more likely that the site is still waiting for a volunteer editor to review it.

    So why does it take so long to review suggested sites? Well, we get something in the region of 30,000 new site suggestions every week, and the number of active editors is currently just under 6,000. The process of reviewing and listing a site is not as straightforward as some people might think. First, editors need to check whether or not the site meets out site selection criteria. Then they need to ensure that the title and description follow our editing style guidelines, editing or rewriting them if necessary. Finally, the editor needs to make sure the listing is published in the most appropriate category. (And of course adding suggested sites isn't the only thing that editors need to do to build and maintain the directory - but that's something for a future post).

    To help readers understand all the processed that go in to approving (or rejecting) a suggested site, we've prepared a step-by-step guide: How suggested sites are reviewed and published at the ODP. You'll see that using the correct title, providing a proper description, and suggesting your site to the right category are all likely to speed up the process of getting your site listed. It will also leave more editorial time free for reviewing everyone else's sites too.


    How suggested sites are reviewed and published at the ODP

    The following step-by-step guide details the typical way in which a publicly suggested site is reviewed and listed (or rejected) by editors at the Open Directory Project. For further details about site suggestions, please see: ODP Help: Submitting your site.

    1. A member of the public finds a good website that isn't listing in the ODP. (There is no requirement for it to be the owner of the site who suggests it.)

    2. He/she finds a suitable category and uses the "suggest URL" form to suggest it to us. A confirmation screen shows that the suggestion has been received. (No other communication from the ODP or its editors concerning the suggestion should be expected.)

    3. Some manual spam filters allow repeated, multiple, automatic, and malicious submissions to be filtered out at an early stage and prevent ordinary editors having to deal with such suggestions. Only suggestions made in clear defiance of the site suggestion instructions are removed at this point.

    4. A couple of days after the suggestion was made, the site suggestion appears in the unreviewed pool of the category in question. The unreviewed pool for each category is a special hidden area visible only to editors. It contains the sites suggested to that category by the public, and also any sites specifically moved there by editors.

    5. Time passes until an editor with permissions in that category decides to look at the unreviewed pool and review some sites. This could take anywhere from a few minutes to a year or more. (Note that all editors are volunteers, adding new sites isn't the only editing activity, and that public suggestions aren't the only source of sites to add.)

    6. An editor decides to review some sites in the category in question. The editor may or may not decide to look at the particular suggestion. Some look at sites in date order, some look for ones with titles and descriptions that already meet our guidelines for site titles and descriptions.
    • If the site is not looked at this time, go back to #5.
    • If it is, then go on to #7
    7. An editor looks at the suggested site, and tries to decide if it's listable based on our site selection criteria. In some cases this is easy, and will take just a few seconds. In others, it may take significantly longer, and the editor may even feel that they're unable to decide themselves right now. Possible outcomes include:
    • The site is found to be listable, and the editor decides they want to list it. Go to #8.
    • The site is found to be listable, but the editor decides to leave it for now for some reason - perhaps the editor has something else to do in real life, or the description would need a major (time-consuming) re-write. Go to #5.
    • The editor isn't sure, so decides to leave the site for now. Perhaps someone else will have a better opinion before he/she comes back to it later. Or perhaps they'll ask a more experienced editor for an opinion. Go to #5.
    • The editor isn't sure, but does know that the site doesn't belong where is it now. He/she sends the site to the unreviewed pool of a more suitable category for evaluation by an editor with more experience in that area. Go to #5.
    • The site isn't listable, and so is deleted.

    8. The editor now has to decide if the current category is the best one for the site, and if necessary rewrite the description to meet our site description guidelines. If the current category is suitable, then the description is rewritten and the site published. Go to #9. If not, then the site will sent to a more appropriate category. There are now several possibilities:
    • The editor has permissions in the destination category, and is sure the site should be listed there, and so publishes the site. Go to #9.
    • The editor has permissions in the destination category, but instead sends the site to the unreviewed pool there. This could be for a variety of reasons - perhaps he/she doesn't have that much experience in that area and isn't sure exactly which category it should be listed in; or perhaps he/she doesn't want to spend time rewriting the description, and would prefer to spend their building up listings in the current category that he/she is working on. Go to #5.
    • The editor doesn't have permissions in the destination category, so the site can only be sent to the unreviewed pool. Go to #5.

    9. The site is now officially listed in the ODP.
    • The publicly viewable pages at http://www.dmoz.org/ will update to reflect this within a couple of days (and usually much faster), but the database that the search function is based on is only updated once a week.
    • It may take up to two weeks for the listing to appear in the RDF Data Dump, which is available for download and use by others under the ODP licence.
    • Downstream users of the RDF Dump (e.g. the Google Directory) update their own data sets on their own schedules, over which the ODP has no control. If a site is listed in the ODP, but not showing up in data presented by downstream users, then this matter should be taken up with the downstream user in question.

    Posted by Emily Kayser | Comments (40)
    Reader Comments(Page 1 of 1)
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