What percentage of ODP submissions are made by corrupt webmasters?

[Marcia]

Or are most that are submitted erroneously done by innocent, saintly souls who simply misunderstand the instructions for submission?

And out of those, what percentage are high dollar commercial sites, or local churches or maybe even soccer moms and daycare moms on AOL who hardly know how to use the internet?

Any hard figures or educated guesses? Just wondering, I thought it would be an interesting take on demographics.

[kctipton]

A rather high % of submissions which end up in the wrong place can be squarely blamed on software/people targeting a certain keyword in a category path (say, move every category called "software").

Categories where there's tons of money to be made by "referring" such as mortgages and poker are >98% slammed by lead-generating sites.

Other categories get many submissions far too high in the tree, suggesting that the submitters didn't want to try to figure out a specific subcategory that would work for their site(s).

There's no way to know if any of these people are corrupt webmasters, though. People ignoring the guidelines for content, yes. People not trying to find the "best" category, yes. People who won't take the time to write a proper title or description, yes. People who submit vanity URLs when the actual site is framed, yes. People who submit multiple mirrors of the same content, yes.

[Gerardism]

For one of the local regional categories that I manage, for the real estate section, its clearly labeled exactly how the title should be, and still people don't follow the rules.

I tend to think alot of people just don't read the instructions and there's still a few SEO'ers that think that they can get away with over stuffed title tags. For the common innocent folk that are not meaning to spam/corrupt the index, I find a lot of them just don't read/follow the directions that is clearly stated and they don't know too much about SEO or just enough to be dangerous,.. heh.

[PhilC]

Submitting to the wrong category can cause self-inflicted delays. I'm sure it's done either to get higher up the tree for the higher PR, or because some people can't be bothered to find the exact category for the site, or some people want a wider coverage than a narrow category provides. Having said that, the exact category isn't always obvious to someone who doesn't frequent DMOZ, and even for many newer editors. Even so, an editor can't be blamed for thinking that, if the submitter can't be bothered to find the right category, neither can I. So a site may get moved to the unreviewed list of a nearer category, but not quite the right one. Eventually, after several long delays, it may end up in the right category and actually get listed. Submitting to the wrong category, for whatever reason, usually causes self-inflicted delays.