hutcheson
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Everything posted by hutcheson
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>> ... an affiliation with www.industrialquicksearch.com ... "Affiliation" is perhaps a bit of an understatement. My personal relationship with my own fifth thoracic vertebra would be, on this scale, a, um, "nodding acquaintance". The ODP's technical description for this is "vanity doorway domain to a search results page", suggesting about 2.5 reasons why such URLs should absolutely not be listed.
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I've looked at the site itself. I believe that you do not need to worry about being reviewed by a competitor: if reviewed by any guidelines-respecting editor, it would be rejected -- read the submittal guidelines to find several sufficient reasons.
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My own take on this subject is that both sites mentioned should be listed ONLY in the ONE more specific category you mentioned. @links should be present to take visitors from the more general category to the more specific, so that the sites would apparently be listed in a single subcategory of Classifieds/Free (which was also apparently a subcategory of Classifieds/Auto/B2B.) Your spotting this category overlap will, I hope, the the incentive needed to fix this flaw in the ODP taxonomy. (Thanks. This is one of the strong motivations for ODP editors to participate in public forums.)
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I don't know exactly what you posted, thehelper, but it would have been good to leave it. If it agreed with me, people could see that it's not just a god-complex, I really do have my own prophets; if you disagreed, then people can see it's just hutcheson spleen-venting again (and discount as necessary). And in either case, a more concise, or a more detailed reply, might have its own inherent virtue.
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>>We gather and market Mortgage Leads for Lenders/Brokers Nationwide. If I understand your more detailed explanation, this is a very fair and succinct description of the site. But think about it this way -- that is not about providing mortgages to consumers, it is about providing marketing services to companies. If the site can be properly listed anywhere, it must be somewhere under Business/Industries/Marketing. What you say about not being an "affiliate link" is true. However, within the editing community, this kind of site (collecting information from customer, and delivered to an often anonymous company) is also loosely called an "affiliate site" although we might also call it a "reverse affiliate" or "blind affiliate" or "blind doorway" site. Since the editors can't see what you are doing with the data, they don't really know whether you are processing it within Thornton Mortgage, shipping it to ABC Mortgage Company, selling it to several companies, or broadcasting it to identity thieves in the third world. In this case they made the (charitable but perhaps wrong) assumption that the data went to Thornton Mortgage, so a person who wanted to go to TM could, well, go directly to their website. I believe that, even given the explanation like you gave here, the editor still did the right thing...because (to coin an admittedly obscure aphorism, which perhaps only editors will understand) "we review websites, not descriptions thereof." As to the second issue: ODP has guidelines about picking which of several possible URLs to use for a site. Helping sites track visitors is explicitly NOT a factor in that process. All we can say is, "Sorry, but that needs to be a matter for your own technical support people. The only help ODP can give you is an excellent directory of sites containing technical information or offering technical consultants."
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Yes, there are many reasons why an editor would go to a site from the "unreviewed" queue, and then neither list nor reject the site. I do it quite often. Some possible reasons: -- it needs to be sent elsewhere (possibly a category in a language I don't speak), so send it there (still unreviewed) -- it looks like a great site, that will need to be reviewed thoroughly and then sent to 2 or 3 other categories (possibly in other languages) sites for listing. -- it looks like an affiliate site, but needs more investigation -- oops, my boss just walked in and wants to talk about remunerative work. -- oops, my wife/child/... just walked in and needs the telephone NOW. -- oops, I need this browser window to do more research on a site I'm reviewing in ANOTHER browser window. -- oops, this site (or the site in that other window) crashed my browser. (Bill Gates and All His Demons are Alive and Well on Planet Earth.) -- oops, the site doesn't crash my browser, but it does demand plugins or extentions that I don't have. -- the site abuses its visitors with popups/graphics/interminable download times/excessive banner ads or any of 50 gazillion forms of REALLY REALLY bad web design. -- Aargh! I can't stand another second of this! I need to see living things: birds, flowers, grass, trees, fungi; I can't stand the lint buildup in my navel a second more; dinner is long overdue, etc. There really is no way of second-guessing the editor. But if I had to bet -- and I could bet without the danger of ever finding out whether I was right or wrong -- my first guess, for a site in a Regional/Europe/France category that had been quickly and briefly visited twice but not listed, would be ... "The site is in French, or primarily in French, and was therefore quickly sent to Test/Misplaced/World/Francais, for sorting out by someone who knows French." It's worth repeating this, not because I want to know about this site, but because this is a very common submittal mistake, and one that causes both maximum site delays AND maximum editor effort. First we have to figure out what language it's in -- often not obvious to, say, American editors; then the editors in the right language have to find the right category in that language -- which may be no easier than for an English-speaking "Arts" editor to find the right "Computers" category (or vice versa).
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>>I am wondering why so many have not been touched ... "Directory" sites are spam magnets for affiliate banner farms, not to mention "tiny link pages." "Directory" categories are therefore not much fun to edit...and each site takes longer to review than "onsite content" sites -- the "to borg or not to borg" question is always present, and if a directory is really any good, it is worthwhile to add its links to the ODP. (If it's not any good, then it's not worth listing.) The combination of all this -- fewer amateur reviewers, more incessant spammers, more laborious reviews -- is, naturally, larger backlogs.
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>>I for myself hate site doing popups, popunders and so on. Cheering in the background!!! <warning: useful information, but expressed somewhat emotionally. You might call it a "rant"> I have some personal standards about sites I accept. I do not accept sites that do popunders. End of story. I hate popups, but at least they're obviously associated with the site I'm visiting. But popunders and exit popups -- I despise the attitude that says you can do something you know most users despise, so long as they don't notice until after you're gone. (It's like saying murder is bad, but a drive-by shooting is all right.) Now, that's not generally the ODP standard (BUT NOTE WELL--SOME CATEGORIES DO HAVE SOME SUCH STANDARD!), and so when I refuse to list such sites, I don't delete them either. I leave them with a note saying something like "inflicts popunders on hapless visitors" for someone else to review....later, perhaps much later....if they have a stronger stomach.
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>>I was just wondering if there are search engines on the internet who take exactly the same search results as shown by the search index of ODP. If I understand your question correctly, the answer is NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT! NEVER! The ODP search index is little more than a COMPLETELY-un-page-ranked-or-relevancy-tested COMPLETELY-random-order search of the ODP SITE, including all of its listings of website titles, descriptions, and URLs. No post-stone-age real search engine would limit itself to no-relevancy-order-whatever and less-than-3-million-pages-listed! You can, if you wish, put a link to ODP search on your own site; many editors and a few other people have done this. You can, if you're moderately clever, get a great deal of good information starting from ODP search and browsing ODP categories. But it is not and will never be mistaken as an adequate substitution for a search engine. Every now and then someone gets excited about their alleged high "site rank" in ODP, or tries to figure out how to improve their low rank. It's a waste of time for both reasons mentioned -- there is no rank, sites appear in an order that has NOTHING whatsoever to do with ANYTHING at the site itself, or the frequency or relevancy of ANYTHING in the ODP listing. There are only two ranks for ODP keyword searches: 0="not found" and 1="found".
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Re: A whole directory vanished? >>I can surmise the hutcheson idea to err is human but to err 200+ times – I don’t think that’s a very realistic assumption. It's VERY realistic. Trust me on this one. If ODP dumped every editor once they got to 200 mistakes, I wouldn't have made it to editall. I still remember the month that there were 5 or 6 groups of editors actively discussing how to clean up my earlier work in different parts of the directory. And just yesterday, while I was working around a long-neglected category, I fixed three blatantly-non-compliant listings, and happened to notice that they had last been edited by three different metas. Most importantly, when you're dealing with these "affiliate banner farm" sites whose sole purpose is to seem to be what they are not (advertising or customer trapping sites masquerading as goods or service providers) and whose willingness to expend almost limitless effort to improve the opacity of their deception, learning to spot the spam is a never-ending process. Sometimes the ONLY way to detect it is to say "hmm, I've tasted this same garbage with different food coloring a dozen times this month already" -- but that happens only after that same site has obtruded itself into the directory a dozen times. (This is why editors hate spam so much, and yet seem to let it in so often. The former is the inevitable effect of the latter.) And this is also why, down in the salt mines of the website review process, it's always palpably obvious that the idea of achieving omniscience, let alone emmanentizing apotheosis, is inconceivable. But overall, I'd still happily compare the ODP to any other web directory -- for comprehensiveness, acuity of classification, and consistency or usefulness of descriptions. And we can make it better.
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Just in case: Unlike some other directories, ODP does allow multiple editors in a category. The question (for metas reviewing your application) is not "is this real estate already staked out?" but "does this applicant have something to offer here?" If you can find three good, relevant websites not already listed, and you think you might be able to find a dozen more within the next 6 months, then you have something to offer! And the presence of one, two, or three current editors will not even slow your application down. (Remember, one or more of those editors might be almost completely dormant, or very busy in other categories anyway!) So: How to locate categories that need YOU as editor? ANY subject for which you know a dozen websites not already listed, DESPERATELY needs YOU. Any subject for which you know three websites not already listed, probably will be considered to be needing YOU.
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A bit more information. I made some inquiries, and was told that the ODP practice is, if a COMPANY offers web development and ANYTHING ELSE AT ALL, its SITE OF CHOICE will receive ONE listing (under Web Designers) whose description will also mention the other services they offer (dns registration, website hosting, pet care ... well, maybe not pet care.) If this is correct (and I have no reason to believe that it's not) your company is already listed IN THE RIGHT PLACE, but (if the description doesn't mention website hosting) perhaps NOT WITH THE RIGHT DESCRIPTION.) You can request a description change using the UPDATE URL button on your company's current listing. If their website design approach involves spreading out their products over multiple domains, then you should make sure that it's easy to get to all of them from the home page as listed in the directory (but isn't that a basic principle of good web design for honest companies anyway? -- and in fact it looks like you've already done that. I do like the layout of your home page--very easy for a visitor to see what all you do, and how to get to the product or service of interest.)
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What hildea said. As you see, ALL the keywords you are interested in are ALREADY in the category name, which is logically associated with EVERY site there, including yours. Now, you have noticed that some search engine, somewhere out there, DOESN'T use all the ODP information we are ALREADY giving them. That is true. But it would be incredibly foolish and futile of us to try to compensate for the information in one database field (category title) they aren't using, by manually duplicating the same information 3.5 million times in another field (website description) THAT THEY AREN'T USING EITHER! You think the SEs could make better use of the information we're already giving them? So do I. I hope for all our sakes that Teoma's challenge is robust enough to challenge, say, Google to strengthen their "theming" algorithm using our category names...and that Teoma is clever enough to figure out how big an advantage ODP's data is to google, and to incorporate it into their own work. But asking us to hand-keyword-stuff all our entries to overcome deficiencies in each of 2 or 3 major search engines is ... too much. And asking us to stuff just YOUR entry ... you could get an editor removed for showing favoritism like that.
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>>So are you saying if I remove the references to domain registration then the site can qualify for an OD listing. Actually, no. I think it would then qualify as a skunk in the mailbox: it might not get noticed for a while, but when an editor looked closely ... Really, we aren't trying to reward information-hiding. The ODP model is very much oriented the other way. My understanding is that you'd have a BETTER chance to get a URL like nicgrab.net/hosting.htm (which looks like a potentially listable legitimate deeplink) than nicgrabhosting.net (which looks like a vanity URL designed to conceal the real provider of the advertised services.) My knowledge of the area is limited, though, so I am carefully NOT saying whether either of them could actually get a listing. Perhaps a more experienced Computers editor could address that.
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From the post: >>We do not offer any services on this web site that is performed by Nicgrab.com again other than links. From the nicgrabhosting.net: >>Our company provides ... top-level domain registration ... We generally go with what the website says: but in this case it is easy to see that both websites offer the same services from the same people in the same office in the same building. We really don't care whether or not the WEBSITE is all sitting in the same PARTITION on the same DISK DRIVE on the same MACHINE. Another thing that confuses many people is the domain-name-versus-website distinction; and therefore they'll buy multiple domain names to get multiple directory listings. This is, first of all, not necessary: a single website can get multiple listings. And it is not sufficient--it takes more than content spread out over multiple domains to be considered as multiple websites.
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Re: A whole directory vanished? I'm not exactly clear on how the editors are, in your theology, "playing God." Is it by making mistakes? (but on my home planet, they say, "to err is human...") Or is it by correcting mistakes, and thus repudiating the notion of editor infallibility? (in my religion, God is infallible.) Is it by talking to mere mortals? (the bit about "talking only to Lowells and Cabots" was never strictly accurate--it was more the other way around. The L&C's didn't listen anyway.) Ah, I have it: I'll, um, forgive this your blasphemy, and even add a friendly tip: "Don't be talking like that about editors anywhere near a cold front. Remember, the cumulo-nimbus warning is traditional but (strictly speaking) unnecessary."
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Re: A whole directory vanished? >>I think prior to making drastic changes in the gambling cats and in other places in the directory - editors and staff need(ed) to make huge changes in their public relation practices. I think you'll find that editors often have a more expansive vision than you're assuming. Deleting one spam-filled category that had proven useless for our audience is not "drastic": we've ALWAYS got MUCH bigger improvements than that under discussion! And I strongly suspect that the agreement between Netscape and the editors may have relinquished to Netscape insufficient control over editors' speech to implement the sort of "Public Relations Practice" you envisage. Even this forum is a strictly volunteer project. Quality issues like the Guides and Directories categories really do take a high priority -- even above "building a comprehensive directory," much less "listing submitted sites promptly," and FAR above "making changes in public relations practices." But there's hardly anybody in here but us volunteers, so hardly anything you don't do gets done as quickly as you could want it to.
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>>Does it mean that we should not publish our OWN content - articles written by our editors - on this topic? It does not mean that. I think the point is that you SHOULD publish YOUR own content. As you say, there are a lot of articles about backgammon already. It will be the editors' judgment as to whether your articles contain "sufficient sufficiently unique" information, but if you are neither obviously plagiarizing, nor obviously "lowballing" (that is, trying to calculate to the jot-and-tiddle level exactly how many characters of text you need to get a listing, and providing not one comma more), nor obviously "affiliate banner mine salting" (that is, providing a minim of text just to have something to wrap around the advertising) then the editors are generally fairly liberal in interpreting the "unique content" rule.
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My best guess as to the history is that you overlooked the part in the ODP guidelines about not submitting the same site under two different URLs, and that this contributed to a situation in which each URL was deleted as a mirror of the other (as sometimes happens.) Whatever the cause, it looks like the confusion is cleared up, and (many ODP editors not being the grudge-bearing types) the site is now listed under the inksell.com URL. Did I mention that it really isn't a good idea to submit multiple URLs for the same site?
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Re: A whole directory vanished? Well, actually, much of the rationale appeared first in, um, these forums. There were questions raised about what constituted a useful website, and anyone could see that the answers we tried to give here, didn't match what was plainly visible in the Directories category. It is a kind of roundabout way of contributing to the directory, but we thank you all. Outside review is good. But as a general principle, the ODP doesn't expose its internal workings. It exposes the results. When the results are good, we could be creating them by polynomial-skip Torah Codes--for all anyone should care; when the results are not good, we need to fix the results--by whatever procedure works. (This case fit neatly into the "Not Good" category, so we're trying to figure out which variant of the twelve-tone system works best, and which canonical text of 'Enuma Elish' we should be using it on. If our experiment works, you'll see better results shortly.)
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http://www.1-rated-british-smoked-foods-salmon-balsamic-cavi
hutcheson replied to a topic in Site Submission Status
Re: http://www.1-rated-british-smoked-foods-salmon-balsamic- This URL doesn't work for me. -
Well, ODP certainly does its own versioning -- every week, barring accidents. As for a fixed URL (or, I suppose, URI in this case) -- no, we really don't have that: some categories do simply vanish (each week several categories do (but this is out of 300,000+ categories). Is that stable enough? My LOC topic list includes "deprecated" topic names, that shouldn't be used for future books -- but they map them into the alphanumeric codes (AA9999 or whatever) that, I presume(?), don't change. ODP also has topic tokens (integers), which MAY be really-and-truly fixed.
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How static does a PSI have to be? Obviously, things like the Dewey Decimal System and Library of Congress topic lists are always in a state of flux -- they print new editions every few years, and pile up thousands of changes in between times. My suspicion is that the ODP is more fluid, but surely, even so, you (anyone) could periodically grab a copy of the RDF and anoint it "version xxx.xxx"
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Yes, windharp is definitely right, you should switch to another expert. apeuro is probably right that you were thinking of "multiple sites." I was thinking that that wasn't the best way of thinking of it, from an information-flow standpoint. One developer, one template, one general subject, one sitemaster. What in all that would suggest that there are really multiple sites? Looking at it from the other way around, it does not benefit the user to conceal these fraternal relationships between cloned sites. And so the ODP should not encourage such behavior. Therefore we should treat a good deeplink in one site as if it had been submitted under a distinct, vanity domain. A poor deeplink, or a pattern of submittals of poor deeplinks, however, is enough to get a site banished under ALL of its aliases. Pre-qualifying deeplinks (as in by posting the URL in a forum like this) is probably a good idea...provided you take the advice. (So far, the advice has been based on plans or assumptions rather than actual implementation.)
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Since you are both starting out and aiming for a broad category overall, I'd: 1) Start by submitting the main site. If it doesn't have enough content, obviously none of the "vanity URLs redirecting to deeplinks" would. 2) Don't try to conceal the relationship between the sites. That will just tell the editors you aren't honest. Is that the message you want to send? Instead, link between the individual game sites, maintain a "home page" with links to all individual game sites. This has an additional advantage: as you add new games, they immediately become visible (since Google will spider them via your (already listed) home page. 3) Submit your most unique-content-rich subsite to the individual game category. (This may be your most-content-rich subsite, or a smaller subsite for less-popular game that's not well represented on the web.) Submit the deeplink, not the vanity domain. We do list deeplinks if there's enough content. (Another unique ODP service.) 4) Wait to see what happens to that deeplink before submitting any more. If that is accepted, drop two or three more deeplinks in (when they get to the point of having comparable unique content.) If they are accepted, try some more; if they are rejected, take the hint and wait until your content is richer. (Then, in your resubmission note, mention "this content has been added since the last site submission....") If you do it this way, I believe I can promise you'll retain your reputation unsullied by the whiff of proprietarily-named processed pork products, and the site will be as well represented as it deserved.