DMOZ is probably the directory that drives the most value to websites. A site listed will get quality visitors every day and good value for search engines. People want desperately to be on dmoz and they will do anything, but surprisingly, they don’t do simple things that will count on their mission. I don’t understand how people want desperately to list their site on dmoz, but they can’t do simple tasks like writing a normal title and a good description. Few years ago I had a site with not too much links poiting to it, but when he made to dmoz, the pagerank went to 4 and I am sure that at least half of the value was from the open directory.

I used to be a dmoz editor, and I can tell you that 5 of 10 sites submitted were real junk ( parked domains, under constuction websites, plagiated content, no content at all ), but 4 of the other 5 couldn’t be accepted because of bad title, description or wrong category. Despite I took my time to edit the title and description and to approve every website that worthed, it took me a great deal of time and I was never able to review all the sites submitted.

I want to write about the most common mistakes that webmasters make when they submit the website to DMOZ.

1. They hurry to submit the website while it is underconstruction.

Maybe people assume that it will take some time until an editor will look over the website to approve it. While this can be sometimes true, there is a high chance that you website will be reviewed in the first few days after you submit it. If the website is still under construction then your website will get passed and it may be never reviewed. If this is so important to you, why can’t you wait few more weeks until the website is finished ?

2. They submit the website immediately after it is published.

A new site can have problems that were not discovered during the development process. New blogs have very few content, and they are usually not polished. Why waste the opportunity to get into DMOZ and submit your website while it is not established yet ?

3. The category is wrong.

If the category is wrong, the editors will move it to the right category, but the website has to be reviewed again by the editors of the new category. It is a wasted opportunity and the new editors might not want the website into their category so they can ignore it or move it to another until it is either lost in space or rejected.

4. The title is biased.

For the editorial process to go straight, we need to understand as fast as we can what is the website about, what kind of value it adds to the internet, etc. I have seen a lot of titles starting with: “The best…”, “Most popular..”, “The biggest..”. While this may be good for you advertising campaign, it is a lie. We can’t accept titles like that. The title should describe what the website is about, and not to lie about the popolarity or quality.

5. The description is short and incomplete.

If you just copy paste the description that you add to every directory, it will probably get rejected. Some editors will change the description to comply with the rules, but only if they think that the website is great. If it is an average website many editors won’t bother and will move on the the next site.