Does anyone actually read the guidelines when submitting to a directory? From my experience from my directories only the people paying are following the guidelines and probably one out of 20 free submiters and maybe even less. It becomes really frustrating after a while, at first I was editing titles and descriptions but now that the ammount of submissions has skyrocketed after the PR update if I spend time changing titles and descriptions the backlog grows bigger and bigger. I can handle a wrong title or a wrong category but when the title, description and category are all wrong it's impossible to edit them all and keep the review times acceptable. On the other hand I hate to delete listable sites. So this is a rant and a question at the same time. How do you handle these kind of submissions? (listable sites that need quite a bit of editing) Oh, and directory owners are not better than most other webmasters a lot of them seem to believe that SUBMIT YOUR SITES NOW!!!! Is a description
I'll usually scan through it at a glance..but if the guidelines are in bold/different color,then I'll usually read it.
I had the same issue, more specifically bad email addresses being used to list a site with. I added a simple 'how not to get listed' section and for some reason ever sense I posted that three weeks ago I have yet to get an invalid email address. I also found that if they don't care to list their sites accurately, I don't care to go through with the rest of the review process. While I may loose a few good links here and there. I know I will save some time just deleting the sites any ways. Also break up the text formatting into a few easy to read paragraphs / lists. If you do decide to 'hilight' the important items with 48px sized text that's colored red. It's useless only increased what I was trying to stop.
If there are two or more submission errors, it goes in the bit bucket. The chances are, they'll be back later, and perhaps the next time around they'll do it right. If you rewrite poor listings, you just encourage people to submit any old thing in the hope that someone will fix their errors for them. It could be that a decent site has hired a poor SEO, but more often than not you see these bad submissions coming in for equally bad sites. I have three methods of informing people of how to submit correctly: there's a detailed page of guidelines, information on the submission page itself, and a javascript thingy to inform people when they have made certain errors, and to alert them in some circumstances. So they get plenty of chances to comply. I don't think this has made any difference whatsoever to the proportion of rubbish submissions coming through (although the captcha and other server-side changes certainly have made a difference). But it does make me more ruthless, because I feel I've done all I can to give people fair warning about the right way to submit.