Rejecting Submissions!

Is it just me or do you reject most of your submissions?

I'm not saying being overly picky just the quality of the submissions. Seems like a LARGE percentage of submitters are just QBC and trying to get some rankings. Their site or blog in my case has like 2 posts ranging from April 2006. I'm getting lots more paid submissions but the vast majority I just simply can't list!

Is this frequent in the General Dir Scene? I guess it woud be brand new no content MFA sites. Just find it weird that they are predominatley the ones submitting arghz!!

Thoughts?

 

Last time I counted we were rejecting over 80% of free submissions, a large part of which is all the MFA and other junk sites but a significant number are just because the submitters couldn't be bothered to submit correctly and chose to ignore every rule and keyword stuff everything.

For free submissions we don't have the time to fix them all so the site has to be something special for us to rewrite a bad free submission, and I do mean special as after you've cleared your 100th submission that day it's much easier to click discard.

Paid rejections tend to be much lower as we have the time to correct the submission text and only reject if the site is of low quality, on an inappropriate subject matter or it's a business with insufficient contact details.

That's for our general directory, for the art only directory it must be over 90% rejection rate because people submit real estate and so forth to it, which is not acceptable.

 

I do reject sites occasionally.

 

This is just a guess, but with most free directories you can expect to alot of crapy submissions because people do not care they just want a link. With a paid directory it is a little different, if your prices are under a certain amount then some may think that just becasue they paid they should be listed. I really do not have this problem on index-it, most crappy sites do not want to pay $25 to get listed so for the most part I get some pretty good sites submitting to the directory and therefore my rejection rate is small.

 

My paid directories are at about a 10% rejection, my niche free ones are at maybe 60%, and my free general directory is at about 98% rejection unfortunately.

 

Yes my free directories get 90% spam submissions - it's not good and they waste my time and their own as they wont get accepted..

 

sad to say that my paid directories get 90% rejections because of the ppl not paying,and i reject about 90% from my free directory sites because of spammy,or incompatent or wrong info in the form

 

Hey guys, I may actually be wrong in not rejecting so much but I don't think I reject even 25% of what gets past the first 1/4 second spam-no spam guess. When you say you reject 90%, do you mean of all the submissions counting blatant spam you know it's spam if you look at the description / URL or title for not more than quarter of a second?
In my case, if I get rid of all those 1/4 s spam ones, empty description and non-English (in my TOS) descriptions/sites, I approve the vast majority of what's left. I mean, if I actually visit the site, I would approve maybe 90% of the sites.

 

I'm counting everything that makes it to the live review queue.

Paid submissions for example never get to the live review queue if the submitter doesn't make payment and so we don't see them or count them as rejections.

 

I do reject a huge amount of submissions, and its not that i mind editing descriptions or anything like that, as im forever correcting spelling, turning descriptions into real sentences, generally tidying and making sure everything is ok before an approval.

Ive had some odd submissions before, like my own directory url copy and pasted into the description box.

Another thing i get is people filling the description box with the same text twice, and i dont think my minimum characters is too high as i already lowered it 4 times and want at least for submitters to write a reasonable length description.

Oddly some people will try and squeeze a description into the title, lol

Believe me, i would love to be accepting higher numbers than i do but im in the same boat as most and it can get out of hand when submissions are so rushed.

 

Hello...

What i think it is is that owners just want to keep the same old sites and never upgrade thier sites as we are doing in the web directory business due to the competion as well as ever changing algo...

Ive been noticing the same sites trying to get in other less expensive directopries and they are being rejected till their sites are compliant
and fully functioning...

thx
malcolm

 

And you still reject 80% of those?! Wow, am I the only one thinking that's unnecessarily tough?

 

I reject about 80% of the sites that submit because they do not pay for the review fee. Apparently they think that they are special, so they get rejected. I have had a lot recently that have replied to the rejection email complaining. I then tell them that if they would read the guidelines and the email after submission then they could figure it out and most do. I wish people would understand that they are not going to get free links from every directory especially the ones that have a price next to the submission option. It just makes me laugh sometimes!

 

The main problem I have is people submitting sites to my UK directory which really aren't relevant. I'm still considering not making a full refund to these people, but as they obviously don't read the terms anyway I'm sure they'll plead ignorance.

 

True Story:

A few days ago I have rejected about 79 submissions out of 83 if I remember well. The next day I received an email from a guy asking me to explain why his website has been rejected. Well, I told him about the submission guidelines I even pasted and copied into his email and I asked him to resubmit according to the guidelines. After half an hour my guy resubmitted doing the same silly mistake (long description into the title). I emailed him again pointing that in the title should be just the title of the website, he apologized and he said he will resubmit once more...third time he had the same description into the title minus exactly 2 words
Deh...who said that reviewing links it's easy? )

 

I reject all sites which don't fit my submit guides
The submit rules I especially care are ;

1-ONLY homepage submissions is accepted, Don't submit your inner pages.

2-Main Category submissions are not accepted until You choose Main Category or Fetaured Sites options.. Please select sub categories...

3- No porn, warez, pills,viagra sites, illegal sites, or excessive adsense sites etc..

4-Do not submit sites that are under construction..

5-Submit titles and descriptions in English only...

 

18.021 sites submitted
12.745 sites accepted
00.150 sites pending review

So I think this says all. I get about 1200 sites each week, about 3-4 out of 10 get rejected, mostly because they're sales pages, 1 page sites, excessive use of ads on pages (3 Adsense For Content + 1 Link unit, or entire screen full with adsense and content below the first screen)

I don't really have problems with how users enter the information because the I've programmed the submit form to not allow users to use enter url's with folders (ex site.com/dir/ ), the description forces user to enter at least a few words and the same with keywords.

I also change the captcha sligthly from time to time, which causes programs that automatically submit sites to stop working for a few days, until the regex expression for my captcha gets corrected

 

Yes it's high, but people just don't read, we are slightly unusual in requiring that sites selling items or business sites clearly show a phone number, trading or postal address and offer an online contact method. This catches a lot out.

I've tried everything to highlight this fact but they just ignore it, therefore they are rejected along with all the others that refuse to follow any guidelines.

Besides getting far too many MFA sites we also get a lot of less clued up submission companies submitting their clients, they may submit 100+ listings all incorrectly, therefore this forces our rejection rates higher.

Like loredan I too in the past have taken the time to explain why sites were not listed and yet even after explaining it and giving them sample descriptions and so forth they resubmit with the same mistakes.

Someone once said to me we shouldn't blame the submitters for getting it wrong but we should educate them so they don't. However this seems an impossible task when they don't read/follow the simplest rule.

Changing to paid only is so tempting sometimes.

 

Many of your quality control complaints can be handled from within the
admin panel in phpld 3 such as (number of title characters allowed
as well descriptions in the System >> Edit Settings >> Form Fields

By doing this in phpld admin you will push those that are lazy, keyword stuffers, and the general garbage sites that come your way and allow you
to gather better quality sites that are willing to go the extra mile to be #1

thx
malcolm