Change Request

[jldnno]

We have had our site http://www.the-sensual-woman.com submitted for quite some time to the http://www.dmoz.org/Shopping/Clothing/Undergarments/Lingerie directory. When I asked for the last submission update on 2/20/04 it was still awaiting review. Today when I was checking the catalog I found our website listed in the http://www.dmoz.org/Shopping/Clothing/Undergarments/Lingerie/Exotic/ directory. Thank you very much for including our site. I noticed the link was pointing to http://the-sensual-woman.com instead of http://www.the-sensual-woman.com. I think the company that we had our site submitted through forgot to inclued the www in the link. Is there anyway to get the link changed to include the www or should I be asking this question in another forum.

 

Thanks,

 

jldnno

[hutcheson]

If the link works as is, then it is unlikely we'd want to change it. We try to use the simplest link that works.

[jldnno]

The reason we made the request was because Google, MSN and some other serarch engines which use your database see http://the-sensual-woman.com and http://www.the-sensual-woman.com as 2 different urls even though they actually point to the same site. Google even assigns different page rank to both addresses. This effectively gives us 2 duplicate sites in those engines both of which are diminished from their full potential. I know it's no concern of DMOZ on how well we do in the search results of the major search engines but we would think that if you thought enough of our site to include it in your database (for which we thank you very much) you would want the user that did the search to have the most relevant results. We would like very much to have the url changed if possible to http://www.the-sensual-woman.com . We don't desire to incur the ire of anyone at DMOZ but humbly submit our request for your consideration.

 

Kind Regards,

 

jldnno

[spectregunner]

If one of those sites were not to work, or were to have a permenent 301 redirect in place, then we would address the change.

 

Otherwise, it would be a waste of our time and effort, since we have no real interest in how other websites or directories treat your URL.

[old_crone]

Don't most URLs work with or without the www?

[bobrat]

Most but not all.

 

I've seen requests before about changes because of Google PR problems, so I assume it's a real problem. However, unless we change our guidelines, I guess we won't make the change.

[giz]

If you were really concerned about potentially having duplicate sites, and spread PR, then you would have got your webmaster to configure your webserver correctly from day one.

 

What to do? Set up a 301 redirect so that all requests for any related domain all redirect to the one that you really want to be listed, and have that new URL reflected in what the surfer actually sees in the URL bar when navigating the site.

 

Google for a tutorial on how to set this up.

[dogbows]

OK, time out! Both spectregunner and giz are confusing me. How can you do a 301 re-direct to the same URL? Or am I misunderstanding what is going on here? I thought that there was only one URL, but the www was left off when it was published in ODP, and that is what is causing the problem with Google. So could someone please tell me how a 301 re-direct would help?

[bobrat]

Search Google for

 

301 re-direct "add the www"

 

some of that indicates it may not be so simple as having a 301, but may depend on the host configuration bein set up incorrectly. Also talks about using DNS

[spectregunner]

OK, time out! Both spectregunner and giz are confusing me.

 

Spectregunner was born confused, and having discovered that it is a unique form of bliss, has remained that way for the last 55 years.

[giz]

>> confusing <<

 

Hint: domain.com and w ww.domain.com and site.domain.com and keyword.domain.com are all different sites to a search engine.

 

It is an error to serve the same content on more than one of them at a time. That error is easily corrected by using a redirect.

 

 

It is not an error to serve different content on them (hence editors.domz.org vs. forums.dmoz.org vs. plain old dmoz.org for example).

[dogbows]

ODP Editors are the Greatest!

 

Thanks to all my fellow editors for trying to help. The only re-direct that I have any knowledge of at all is from one URL to a different URL. Of course by being a dinosaur,

and not from the computer era, I am more confused than ever. However, I will use spectregunner's philosophy, consider it bliss, and go on about my business elsewhere.

Thanks guys! lol :moz:

[bobrat]

Me too, I do full time high tech programming, but some of the stuff in the Google search I posted above was totally new and arcane for me.

 

For the first time ever, I needed to do a redirect for one of my clients websites last week. Looked to me like too much trouble to figure out how to do it, since I don't even know what server they are on, and what software drives it, and I'm not being paid by the hour, so I gave up, put in dummy pages that pointed back to home and stuck them in the robots.txt file, so Google will eventually remove them. The "cheap" approach to a redirect.

 

When I was a kid, all web pages had to have www.

[dogbows]

When I was a kid there were no computers much less the internet. lol We barely had a radio.

[bobrat]

Ok, I lied :o when I was a kid, computers had barely been invented. There was only one colour TV I had ever seen, most people did not have any TV, and there was only one TV channel to watch. Most people did not even have phones in the house, let alone a modem.

[dajeffster]

[..."]and there was only one TV channel to watch.

 

Hey... not so bad. DuMont... Jackie Gleason and Professional Wrestling the essence of quality programming.

[dogbows]

You forgot Howdy Doody!

 

But as much fun as the reminiscence has been, I am afraid this thread has drifted way off topic.