As a commercial website designer, you quickly learn that a business wants a website for one reason: to sell more stuff. To that end, a site you design for a company needs to translate into tangible sales. You can create a quality site with eye-catching images and a lot of relevant text and information. You can learn how search engines work and exploit that knowledge to increase site rankings. You can even pay for an advertising service such as Google Adwords. Everything you do to develop a commercial site, promote it, and increase your client's bottom line is in your control. That is, everything except your inclusion in the Open Directory Project.

The Open Directory Project (ODP) is the largest human-edited website directory in the world. While search engines rely on automated spiders and ranking algorithms, the ODP uses human judgment. Human editors individually judge the merit of the sites suggested by users. With this system, the ODP can hypothetically provide better content than automated search engines.

Suggesting a site for inclusion is free, although there is a catch. Since the ODP is edited by volunteers, the time between submission and listing is arbitrary. Some sites get listed in two minutes, others don't show up for two years. Additionally, acceptance or rejection is at the sole discretion of the editor in charge of the category selected. If you submit to the wrong category, submit the same URL more than once, or if the site contains unacceptable content, the site can be rejected with no notification.

So why is the ODP important? A number of other prominent directories such as Google, Yahoo, and AOL mirror the content in the ODP directory. If your site isn't listed in the ODP, it isn't listed in the Google, Yahoo, or AOL directories either. A site can still be found with automated search engines that use spiders, but without a listing in a prominent directory, it isn't as easy to find as it could be.

In terms of commercial sites, and ODP listing can mean more exposure and more sales. But this is where the limitations of the ODP come into play. Getting listed relies on you suggesting a site for inclusion, and then you're at the mercy of the ODP. The category you select for your site may not currently have an editor. If it has an editor, he or she may be too busy to review suggested sites. You can't pay to get your site listed. You can't beg for it. You can't even ask nicely. It's all up to the volunteer editor who may or may not, one day, get around to reviewing your site.

The voluntary nature of the ODP is understandable. The editors have jobs, families, and other commitments. Their lives don't revolve around approving sites that have been suggested for inclusion. This, however, is the root cause of the problem with the ODP when it comes to commercial sites: competing companies are not on a level playing field.

I'll put this into the context of first-hand experience. Years ago, I worked for a manufacturing company. I redesigned their website and submitted it to the ODP, and it was listed within a month. I now work for my own competing company that produces similar products. I've been trying for two years to get my company's site listed in the ODP with no success. My site is similar in quality to my former employer's site. I submit it to the exact same ODP category, with a similar description, every few months, but to no avail. I've tried other categories with other descriptions, but it never appears. I've even tried various resubmission intervals. Sometimes I wait one month, sometimes three, sometimes eight. Nothing seems to work.

So my competitor gets the exposure of an ODP listing, but I do not. When you search for the products we produce, you see the competitor's site listed, repeatedly and prominently from various sites that use ODP data. Our site's listings are fewer and farther between. Because of this, customers are more likely to visit my competitor's site than my own.

There's absolutely nothing in my control to change that. I suggest the site and wait. The category may not currently have an editor. The editor may be too busy to review suggested sites. He may have a bad day and reject all the submitted sites in his queue for all I know. What I do know is that I live in a primarily capitalist society, yet no amount of hard work, dedication, or good old money is going to get my company listed in the ODP. My company is arbitrarily excluded while the competition is not. I lose sales to the competition based on the discretion of a volunteer editor.

You can ask someone at the ODP why you're not listed after suggesting a quality site that meets their standards for two years, but it won't get you anywhere. I've scoured the ODP message board and one thing becomes abundantly clear: ODP editors seem to be elitist snobs. They will merely tell you to suggest and wait. If your site doesn't get listed, too bad. No, they won't tell you why it wasn't listed. They seem to think the ODP is a secret society to which you may one day be blessed with membership. They seem to think "I'm doing this for free on my own time, if I don't feel like approving your site, too bad."

For commercial sites, this is unacceptable. The ODP should realize more responsibility. They aren't merely listing personal sites filled with dog photos and homemade art. They have become integral to a company's exposure on the Web. They should either remove all commercial sites, or honestly do something to ensure equality of acceptance. Given the increasingly commercial nature of the ODP, perhaps they should abandon their utopian ideals of a voluntarily-edited directory and become a for-profit company. Maybe paid editors could do a better job than part-time volunteers. At least then you could have the option of paying for inclusion in this prominent directory rather than suffering at their arbitrary elitist mercy.