Hello all, My question is simple - just what the title says. I checked my analytics today and I saw that I had a referral from editors . dmoz . com, but my site is not listed in the DMOZ directory and I haven't applied to get it listed. Any ideas? Thanks
It's quite possible that an editor was browsing the web and stumbled upon your site. Im not real up to date on technical things, but if he was logged in, that may well show as a referral. Dont worry about the fact that you didnt suggest your site, the majority of editors list sites that they visit whilst surfing, assuming that they have good content and are compliant. Cheers
snooks is correct. Editors are encouraged to find worthwhile sites in all sorts of places, including surfing the web, using search engines, reading the local newspaper, or looking in trade journals (just to name a few). The sites suggested by other people are nothing more than one resource volunteers can use if they want to. For example, I have added over 25,000 sites to the directory, and only a few hundred of those were suggested by other people.
This question seems to have already been answered with a much more realistic idea than mine, but I will tell you for future reference, that HTTP referrers can be forged. There are applications and addons for browsers such as the RefControl extension for Firefox; which allow you to control the HTTP referers sent. Pointless to me, away from websites which show "Top Referrers".. But people seem to do it all the time Jack
Good to know I wasn't aware of that! Thanks! True, I just wanted to know if that refferal means that someone has actually submitted my site for a review
When I was an editor, I would add a site to the queue in my category myself, then check back on the site for several days before actually adding it live. This could be the case with yours... though can not say for sure, as I'm not sure what site, category, or editor we are talking about, and heh, even if I did know those things I still likely would not have a clue. I am just giving one of MANY possible answers.
Just as an experiment, pick out any site you're not familiar with, find a link on it and follow it to that website, look for links on that site and follow it to another site. Do that ten times and you'd be surprised at how many new sites a person could find very quickly, with very little effort. Occasionally, you'll run across a motherload of sites, like you'd find on Chamber of Commerce sites, educational sites, forums for clubs and organizations, ect. that lead you into a big spiderweb of sites. That's why we keep saying we don't really need submitted sites, and that we're not a listing service, every site on the web is fair game for us, and we can find them on our own. That's not cockiness, it's a fact. When we are trying to build a category for a certain topic, like Water Gardens, it's much more effective and efficient (timewise) to just follow the leads we find on water garden sites. They will lead us to the kind of sites we're looking for (for that particular category) and for the most part, we don't have to worry about whether they are mirrors of another site, as we do with many submitted sites. Many editors have found this method to be much more relaxing, rewarding, and efficient than dealing with all the problems submitted sites give us. If there is any message that editors would like to get across to you it's this, I think. We do this freely, as a hobby. We find new sites to list wherever and whenever we want to. We are under no obligation whatsoever to review submitted sites, and our objective is to build categories we're interested in, not to act as a listing service. Because of these facts, there is absolutely no hurry to list sites, as long as the category continues to grow. This truth is just the opposite of how you see us, and what you want, but until you except it, you'll never understand what it is we do or why.