some site violate the rules of dmoz, even though they are listed in dmoz. what is the exact reason behind this. when i visit their site, all web pages contain hidden text, alt tag spamming, meta keywords,description spamming and many more........
Well it does occasionaly happen. As we all know all of the people that approve links are volunteers and none of them are perfect and I'm pretty sure not all of them know what to check for in term of sites that have hidden text, etc. Its not like its extremely hard to become an editor. You sign up and list some sample sites you would approve and bam...done...
Where does it say that hidden text, meta tag spam, etc. is against the rules of dmoz? Hint - it's not against the guidelines.
Just my opinion but... I know how to check for hidden text, meta tag spam, etc. but don't normally bother with it unless it seems to interfere with the way the site works. Generally, as long as it doesn't affect the user experience, all that seo junk contained in the code or hidden in some odd or sneaky way doesn't really matter when reviewing a site for dmoz. An exception is that we do list the true URL no matter what trickery is involved to show a different URL. We don't like things like framed redirects and vanity URLs. If that type of site is mistakenly listed it will be corrected when another editor comes along and discovers the mistake. I believe (not certain) that it's the search engines that deal with that sort of spam. They find it with their filters or algorithms or whatever it is they use, and they apply their penalties or bans. Minstrel I get what you're saying, but personally it sorta makes me wonder why seo types blame dmoz when their site is listed but the listing does them no good. I sorta wonder if it might be something in their code or in their seo technique that harms them with search engines rather than simply having a dmoz description lacking in keywords. Of course when I say I wonder that's exactly what I mean. I really have no knowledge of any of this. I just wonder, but the curiosity is fleeting and I've never bothered to actually look deeper into it. I enjoy editing and I don't care about seo. This is more of an "I wonder why" post, not meant to be informative.
Note to all: A DMOZ listing will have minimal impact on your search engine rankings. In particular, a DMOZ listing will not help you one iota if you are doing anything that contravenes the search engine policies and/or otherwise annoys the search engine.
It's perfectly OK for an editor to have their own directory and they can charge for listings just like any other directory owner. You can find a bunch of directories here, and surely there are a lot more. I wouldn't be surprised if some were owned by editors.
Thank you minstrel. You summed up what I meant perfectly. It's hard for a non-techie person such as myself to communicate that sort of thought.
Lucky you, I had actually to update submission guidelines and add: Mole se webmasteri ako već koriste Mambo da barem promjene meta tag name="description" content="Mambo - the dynamic portal engine and content management system" i stave svoj vlastiti. or in English: To webmaster who are using Mambo could you please at lest replace default meta description name="description" content="Mambo - the dynamic portal engine and content management system" with your own. http://dmoz.org/World/Hrvatski/Slobodno_vrijeme/Igre/desc.html At one point I had about dozen Mambo sites with zero SEO so I had figure what was each one about on my own.
Thank you for reporting that inappropriate category description. I'm sure someone will take care of it shortly.
Ivan, we aren't supposed to rely on meta-data at all. We're supposed to figure out what each site is about on our own because webmasters can put anything they want there. Heck, a lot of them don't even bother putting anything there. I admit, a well written meta description is nice when we come across it, but it's not something we require and I don't believe instructions to the webmaster should be added to the submission guidelines. (added) Ish was faster.
Editors only judge a site on visible content. Hidden text etc. gives you a clue as to the integrity of the webmaster and therefore the site and makes you go look for evidence of other tricks such as the site being a mirror, affiliate material, etc., things that would make the site unlistable. If you don't find that evidence you can (a) skip it if you are still suspicious and move onto another site you are happy about or (b) list it. You can't reject it.
Why was it inappropriate? It would have been nice if there was no meta tags at all but problem I've faced at one point was submission (and running into them myself while searching for something to add) of basically empty sites (couldn't even be classified as under construction) which were completely undistinguishable from completed ones or at lest ones under construction since they all looked more or less identical with same Mambo layout (and to make it worse they all had bunch of links to each other and similar names - very confusing ) so adding that instruction was simple way of testing site owner if this is just another kid who bought a domain and installed Mambo from Fantastico to play around thinking he can make quick cash on "yet another gaming website" until he gets bored (that is until domain/hosting expires) or person is actually little more serious and websites might actually last longer then one year. Even ones which had content got merged, hacked, expired... very annoying to realize that all of my work done to give these websites even a little boost was useless.
I guess, the category description should not educate site owners about technical issues. While it might be a good idea to use utf8 encoding when building sites, it is not appropriate to add a rule like "use utf8" to any category description. It is too general and not realted to the category or the content of listable sites.
It seems to me you were confused about your role. As an editor, wasn't your responsibility to list appropriate websites rather than trying to give site reviews and "a little boost" to fledgling sites?
That is why I wrote "Please" (Mole se). I was planning to remove that anyway since it seems it was passing Mambo craze, although Joomla might trigger another in the future. Actually this would be really useful in my book; I've seen many cool sites totally screwed up with wrong encoding or lack of one. Hmm that is weird I thought I have added this site, can some editall do me a favor and list this website in World/Hrvatski/Društvo/Povijest - if I submit it regular way it will be months before it gets listed since there is only one editor for entire Croatian category and he also has few more cats. Title: Znanost u Hrvata URL: http://public.srce.hr/zuh/ Description: Donosi pregled sa izložbe o povijesti hrvatske znanosti i tehnike od antike do danas i životopise 16 velikana hrvatskog prirodoslovlja. It is really great websites with enormous amount of information (http://public.srce.hr/zuh/izbor.htm) but unfortunately neglected with little complicated navigation (no sitemap), few broken links and lacks codepage but readable to bad it was never fully translated to English. Well this says all <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Internet Assistant for Microsoft Word 2.0z">.
IIRC to list a website I still need to review it to discover if it really has useful content or that tons of pages created through beauty of some CMS are in reality totally blank and I still needed to write description which is based on review that needs to be at the same time short and provide true info about website content - at lest that is how I figured out what my duty at DMOZ was, but then I could be wrong since I got removed. Or should I've just sit tight and wait so if owner ever submit it, then simply delete his hype description and replace it with generic one? What would be point of human editor then, we could just have Robozilla do all the work by creating generic description based on websites keywords (which aren't used in description to avoid hype) - at lest that way there would be zero wait. As for fledgling sites there is really now way to tell which website will exist for next decade and which will be dropped by his owner because who knows what reason. Website size play little role here, I've seen huge sites simply vanish and little ones being maintained for years.
Ivan - I am confused. Are you saying you were listing contentless sites and somehow factoring in their meta tags when deciding? It might explain your removal.
I know English isn't my primary language but I think I made it pretty clear that idea behind my meta guideline was simply to test webmaster if he actually cared about his website or was just another kid who started yet another website with zero content - that way it gives me some idea what to expect because even if website has zero content it still can take up to 5-10 minutes to actually determine that if it is powered by some sort of CMS since a lot of pages are already created when installing CMS, add a forum to that and deception is total until you actually read forum posts and realize its just two kids talking on how this will be greatest website ever once they find somebody who will write actual content for them… I don't know how other editors do it but I use to like to check most pages of each website to see if they really got content and if they got something unique before deciding to list them, reject them or keep them in unreviewed until they grow a little more.