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

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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.

As a new staff member on this project, I wanted to find out what was on the collective minds of the editor community, so a couple of weeks ago, we asked editors to submit their questions about DMOZ. The response was fantastic. We appreciate the thoughtful, insightful questions we received and we're very pleased to be able to answer a few of them here. We've tried to select the ones that would be most representative of the public's questions about the ODP. So without further ado, let's get started!

Who makes up the DMOZ audience?
According to comScore (a company that measures internet audience), DMOZ received about 29,000 unique visitors per day in August 2008. About 60% of visitors were young adults 18-24 years old, and slightly more than half were male.

As we've noted in the past, this is an incredibly international audience. In August, we had visitors from six continents and countries ranging from tiny islands and municipalities (Palau and Vatican City) to large countries with growing markets (India and China).

Does AOL plan to use the international DMOZ data?
The short answer is yes. We know that there is a demand for DMOZ from around the world. There are 78 languages other than English represented in the directory and, thanks to the hard work and dedication of our editors, many of these are quite extensive and well-developed. We are actively looking at ways in which we can better incorporate this resource into properties world-wide.

What does AOL have planned for DMOZ in the near future?
While it's not quite ready for its prime-time debut, we can tell you that we're actively working on an all-new DMOZ that incorporates an updated UI and an overhauled back-end infrastructure. Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to launch!

- emi1y

For the last several months, I've been reflecting on what the 10th anniversary of DMOZ actually means. DMOZ is fundamentally the same site it was in 1998. In the social media landscape we're the old timer's with wisdom and tons of life lessons learned. But is that to say its day has come and gone?

Absolutely not, and I don't just say that because I've spent the last nine of the past ten years keeping house. In part, I came to this conclusion because DMOZ growth has been unabated. The directory still gets an insane amount of submissions, editor applications and data usage. Its overall reach is unparalleled.

The relevancy of DMOZ 10 years later can be traced to its fiercely loyal and dedicated community of editors that has stayed true to the directory's roots and esprit de corps. This loosely organized global community of unpaid enthusiasts managed to collectively take DMOZ from a scrappy startup to a search industry institution. They have almost independently kept it relevant while its commercial counterparts drifted into obscurity or closed up altogether.

It is nothing short of historic that a collective group of volunteers could do this for 10 minutes much less 10 whole years. While the editors routinely get beat up by some industry illuminati for not being market focused, I hope that those folks can take a minute to collectively reflect on the tremendous amount of goodwill this group has shown to simply improve access to information over the web.

Over the years, DMOZ has been often duplicated but never replicated. Many initiatives have co-opted its model, while others have learned the lessons of DMOZ and built community based projects that ushered in the much ballyhooed social media revolution. Projects such as Wikipedia have traced their origins and influence to DMOZ.
Ten years ago, many people were skeptical that a community managed project could survive and become relevant. Ten years later, the DMOZ editors have proved that community managed projects weren't just a pipe dream, but the future of the Web.

But DMOZ hasn't been just about editing. It's been about connecting people from all walks of life. There's a DMOZ editor on every continent. The community represents many ethnic groups, nationalities speaking over 80 languages. Gatherings worldwide of DMOZ editors have taken place, some resulting in marriages and life-long friendships.

The past of DMOZ is full of myths, legends, drama, trauma, successes and failures, all of which help shape its future as social media's Grand Dame.

The tenth anniversary of DMOZ ushers in a new era that will bring in new and exciting changes later this summer.

In keeping with the successes of the past 10 years, the future of DMOZ is as an information provider rather than a destination site. We will be enhancing to service to become more of a 21st century web service and simplify the integration of DMOZ data in other resources and applications, by creating "mashups". For example if you maintain an informational site about gardening, you can use DMOZ to get you a list of hand-picked gardening sites to point your readers too, or if you are a hockey fan you can make a little widget on your blog to show hockey clubs in your local region. Stay tuned and please share your feedback here on the blog. We'll be sharing more information here in the next month or so and appreciate your thoughts.

Thank you to all DMOZ editors past and present for making this project a success. You've touched and made a difference in countless lives, and I'm certain more to come in the future.

Bob Keating, Managing Editor ODP

Isn't that awesome!

We would like to thank to the good folks over at ISEDB.com for the love they sent our way in their post on 'How To Optimize For Google.' A piece that takes a holistic look at optimizing for search engines and today's this portion spoke to all the types of webmaster tools-including directories that are available.

Not that I'm biased, but I think we can all agree that the most exciting take away is that search engines love place a different value on free, human edited directories. The point is easily debatable. Perhaps a link in DMOZ is as valuable as any other link on the web or maybe it is worth more. Purely sharing the comment and curious what you all think.

Link to article here. Ctrl+F - type in DMOZ and you're there.

Quotes below ( underline added by me - strikethrough to show "what not to do" )

Getting a site into DMOZ is like Gold.

Google loves links from DMOZ and your site will reap the benefits.

The big catch however is actually getting your site into the directory in the first place. Find the perfect category for your site and check to see if it has an editor. If you see a link "Volunteer to edit this category" try and find another relevant location. Pages without active editors take much longer to get listed into. Once you find the perfect directory submit your site every 4-6 months until listed. If you are lucky you will get in eventually.

UPDATE...the one part where this article is off ( and not helpful in getting your site into DMOZ ) is in the multiple submissions...this actually won't help your chances at all.

Also, there is a great post from Bob Keating to check into on 'Why Hasn't My Site Been Accepted Into DMOZ" specifically including this passage here:

No one is monitoring the category. While a few categories in DMOZ may not have a listed editor that doesn't mean there's no one minding the store. All editors listed higher in a category's hierarchy can and do edit subcategories. In addition, many editors have permissions to edit anywhere in the directory.