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Why Getting Approved In The Open Directory Takes So Long

By corbyboy ⋅ November 4, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

With over 4.5 million sites listed in more than half a million categories, the Open Directory Project (ODP) is by far the largest human-edited directory on the Internet. Incidentally, if you didn’t already know, ODP’s alternative name is “Directory Mozilla,” hence the URL dmoz.org.

It is also one of the very few directories that people still recommend for link building purposes. Many directories have had their ability to pass Page Rank removed, but a link from the ODP is still treasured by many webmasters.

Sites are submitted manually and each submission is manually reviewed before being approved or rejected. One of the annoying things about submitting to ODP is the amount of time it takes to have a site approved. It can literally take years. Frustratingly, if your site doesn’t appear you don’t know if it has been rejected or if it is still waiting to be reviewed.

A recent post on the DMOZ blog explains the process from an editor’s point of view. It gives the reason why reviewing a site can take so long.

The Review Process

Time passes until an editor with permissions in that category decides to look at the unreviewed pool and review some sites. This could take anywhere from a few minutes to a year or more

ODP receives about 30 000 new site suggestions every week, and while the homepage states that there are 81 000 editors, only about 6 000 are active. Editors are assigned to specific categories and can only review sites that are submitted to that category.

When an editor has some spare time to edit a category, they look at a pool of sites and choose one to edit. Note that the blog post above states that this process “could take anywhere from a few minutes to a year or more.” Sites are not necessarily reviewed in the order they were submitted; the editor can pick and choose which site to edit and which ones to leave in the pool.

If a site is fine, or only needs minor changes made to it, it is quickly approved and added to the directory. If a site is listed in the wrong category, the editor can drop it back into the pool, or bounce it to another category. This is where things start to take time. If you haven’t bothered to take the time to choose the correct category, chances are that the editor who has just looked at your site won’t take the time either and it will probably just be sent to the pool of sites of another generic category. It doesn’t get preferential treatment because it has been looked at by another editor; it has to wait its turn to be edited again like all the other sites.

Always Submit to the Correct Category

Let’s look at an example.

I submit my PHP-related website to DMOZ but I accidentally submit it to the health category. Maybe this category is edited quite frequently, so it is looked at within a week.
The editor of the health category doesn’t know anything about PHP, but knows your site looks computer related. The site is then bumped to the computers category.
Perhaps the computer category is edited quite frequently too, so your site gets looked at within a month. This editor can see that your site is too specific for the computers category but realises it looks like some kind of programming language. It is then sent to the pool of websites for the programming category.
This category is not looked at very often, so it takes six months for somebody to review your site on the programming category. This editor can see that your website belongs in the PHP category, so once again it is assigned to a new category.
The PHP category is edited very rarely indeed. It takes 9 months for somebody to look at your submission in this category before it is finally approved.
All of this time and effort could have been saved by simply submitting your site to the correct category 16 months ago!

This is only an example, I don’t know how often each category is edited. But now you understand how the editing process works, you can understand the importance of making your title and description accurate and taking the time to ensure you have submitted to the correct category. It may make the difference between having to wait two months for approval, or two years!

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