Sometimes for whatever reason, a site owner wants a listing removed from the Open Directory. Often no reason is given, sometimes it’s because they do not like the description provided by the editor. Now if the description is wrong, it’s reasonable to expect the editor to fix it. But usually it’s because the site owner does not like the boring factual descriptions that editors provide, and wants a hype filled keyword stuffed one.

More recently this has been affected by Google’s use of ODP descriptions, rather than extracting one from the sites or the site meta tags. Site owners do not want to have those descriptions shown in Google results. Why is Google doing this?

Google’s creation of snippets is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. We don’t manually change sites’ descriptions, but we’re always working to make our snippets as relevant as possible.

As an editor, I take that as validation from Google that in general, editor provided descriptions are more meaningfull in search results that ones from site owners. And that means that to keep ODP useful, there is no reason to remove a site in this type of situation.

There are other reasons not to accept an email request for reamoval. Apart from anything else, we would have to go through a whole bunch of validation to decide who actually owns the site - and that’s a nightmare in itself. Nothing was ever implemented to handle that kind of issue. Sites will be removed that contain illegal content, or if a court order is issued. For example if a site is owned by two people who are having a dispute, we would not want to remove a site because one person asked for it, and then get flack from the other that wanted it left there - we have to go only by what we see at the site.