Since our start up 9 months ago, we received over 50,000 visits and delivered over 5,000 clicks to sites listed in our directory. Today is the day when we move closer to ad-free directory and one step closer to delivering more relevant information. We removed advertisements from content area of our pages.

However, we are not completely getting rid of ads, we still need to pay for our hosting and editorial time you know.  Therefore we’ll allow private sponsors an option to still advertise on our site.

When we were just starting up half a year ago, we used to rewrite and edit all free submissions that did not follow our guidelines. It was our way of saying thank you to everyone who believed in our project. We rarely rejected or denied a listing based on its misleading title or description, and always tried to help our submitters get listed in our real estate directory, but January 2008 is the month we decided to put an end to that.

Almost 700 submissions later, we came to a point where our editors can’t keep up with the volume and time it takes to edit every submitted listing. In order to resolute this problem, we are now rejecting the following:

1.  We will reject listings that get submitted to unrelated categories or top categories where they don’t belong.
We are pretty good at determining when a listing gets submitted to a wrong category and needs to be moved into an appropriate one, and a listing that was just spammed through to “save up” submission process time. If you think tricks like this will work with us, think again, 36Towns is not a robot, 36Towns is full of human editors and there is absolutely no way stuff like this will pass through our fingers.

2. We will reject listings that have nothing but keywords, services and offers separated by commas, and similar copy-pasted spam stuffed in description.
These are usually submitters with a group of listings being entered all at the same time. Some of them are submission companies, some are SEO companies and others are owners of multiple real estate sites. Guess what, you are still getting rejected even if try to submit your spam for the second and third time after we reject it. And if it happens again, we will ban your domain and your IP address.

We hope this message will improve our approval rate and quality of submissions in the future. We ask that you spend some extra time, study our category hierarchy, choose an appropriate category, write a good description according to our guidelines and we will approve your submissions in no time. At the end of the day, why should we spend time editing your mistakes and reward you with a free listing for that!