Whether you call it DMOZ, ODP or the Sandbox Buster you should be familiar with it. Dmoz.org is a powerful and easy tool if you understand it. DMOZ has been around a long time and people have been complaining it for almost as long.
It has over 74,000 volunteer human editors that manually review each submission. Most of these editors are people that are honest. Some are not. Some editors because of their personal bias will delete sites and manipulate anchor text and descriptions. Before you start complaining let’s get real. Out of 74,000 humans there has to be some bad ones. DMOZ does police itself but because of the great power it carries with its links, Google trustrank and oh yea its FREE it attracts a number of people to try and abuse it.
If you feel that your site has unjustly not been listed in DMOZ, make sure of a few things.
Did you wait long enough from when you submitted it? DMOZ has a backlog of over 2 million submissions. Your submission is probably going to take weeks or months.
Did you follow the DMOZ guidelines? DMOZ does not allow keyword stuffing. If you substitute your company name for your keyword, you were probably deleted for that violation. If your description was longer than 2 sentences and full of CAPITALIZED keywords, it also was probably disregarded.
Does your site has real content? Would Matt Cutts of Google Quality Control think you have real content? DMOZ is looking to create a directory of websites not 1 page business card sites.
If you CAREFULLY read the DMOZ guidelines and followed it and waited and are still not listed, then try to contact the editor for that category. After waiting a few weeks (don’t forget the 2 million submission backlog) then ask the DMOZ editor for the larger category that your sub-category is a part of.
DMOZ is a great place to start, but if you help other people get their sites listed in directories, this is one that I would not be too heavy on the promises. Yahoo and business.com both carry almost as much weight, and you can be assured that with a few dollars, you will get your client into this one fast.
Or in my case, find a corrupt dmoz editor to help get you in!
After submitting countless times (I really stopped counting after 10) I contacted the editor of the category and said “Alright, what’s it cost to get me in?” And the rest is history. But Dmoz is one link worth getting.