hutcheson

>>This is the case for Alternative Medicine. No. This is not true. It is not the case for Alternative Medicine. Alternative Medicine is at the level it is, because: 1) It is IS considered to be a topic broadly included in "Health" -- if this confuses you, you might consider which other major category it might better be considered to be a part of. (Arguably a placement down in Society/.../Folklore might fit, but that is not the approach that most visitors would take. People are going to those sites because they want to buy patent nostrums to make themselves physically feel better. That's a "Health"-style motive.) 2) It is NOT (by experts in Medicine) considered to be a PART or KIND of "Medicine." It is a distinct concept. Even when ingredients are shared, the conceptual frame of reference is completely different. Nor is it so considered by practitioners of "Alternative Medicine." For instance, the Homeopathists introduced the term "Allopathy" to emphasize the fact (acknowledged by all) that they did not consider themselves to be doing the same thing as "physicians" even though the desired goal (better HEALTH) was the same. So: A.M. IS in Health, it is NOT in Medicine (but is taxonomically parallel to it.) Since Health is first level, and Medicine is second, A. M is also second level. There is no other place where it could reasonably go. In this, did you notice any discussion of the number of links involved? Read it again carefully. Did you notice that there really was a total lack of concern for the number of links involved?

The best way is to ask for a volunteer here....but I see you've found that out already.

We (both the Christianity editors and the Religion_and_Spirituality editors) are happy with their current placement and name. They were discussed, over a period of almost two years, by editors from many countries and religions, many with practical experience cataloging thousands or myriads of sites, and professional taxonomists with academic and practical experience in other taxonomies involving 50,000 or more categories; they were compared to categories of other major taxonomies (DDS, LOC, Yahoo, etc.) and the community overwhelmingly supported the ODP scheme. (I may say that as one of those who were early suggesting some sort of movement toward the current scheme, I unhesitatingly commend it above any alternative that has been used in ANY major taxonomy.) Since its adoption, the current scheme has grown gracefully to include major categories unsuspected by any of us involved in its design (as indeed was one of our goals in the design). It has since been used to resolve (with at least the appearance of objectivity) various extremely-sensitive and emotion-laden issues, with minimal bloodshed (again, by our intent and effort to that end). Theoretically and practically, it works. I can say that is on those rare occasions when the argument from number of sites arises in any form in the internal editor forums, it is heartily repudiated, just as it has been here. But don't take my word for it: Go tell your librarian that Barbara Cortland deserves a whole Dewey Decimal number, because she's written so many books -- or at least plagiarized the same book so many times). Go tell the Library of Congress that they need a top-level category for "Romances". Go tell Yahoo that there are more affiliate-retail sites on the net than in all their current categories combined. And let us know how they respond. But OUR reaction is that we consider it virtuous not to care, and to the best of our ability we really don't care. And you may rest assured that this reaction is truly representative of the editing community.

Re: help if possible I'm not sure what you're talking about. NONE of the URLs you mention have EVER been in ANY ODP category, nor (given the spamophilic nature of "hotel directory" categories) are they likely to ever be. So it doesn't matter what title they won't have. Not that it would be a problem for two sites to have the same title. It has happened once or twice before, and the ODP development system didn't collapse. Only the URL has to be unique.

Re: Problem getting listed: Portable MP3 Player Site >>How come this site get a listing? Hard to tell, there are lots of possibilities. 1) Added improperly, and not yet noticed and removed. 1a) By mistake--editor didn't notice that the sales were only affiliate. (editor receives information on ODP guidelines when noticed) 1b) Editor abuse--crooked editor added his own site. (editor gets removed when noticed) 2) Added properly, but site changed 2a) Site created to get listing, then changed ("bait and switch" -- this is like cloaking at Google, and it gets the same penalty) 2b) Site changed focus because webmaster lost interest, or someone else picked up the URL for a different purpose. (site gets moved or removed when noticed.) 3) Added properly, but ODP changed (sites may be removed when noticed) 3a) As the depth of depravity of spammers becomes clearer, guidelines are tightened, and sites that might have been tolerated before are recognized as not useful. 3b) As the net matures, more comprehensive and reliable sources appear: and some old references are no longer considered unique or useful enough to be listed. I know that outsiders often obsess about the "hidden motives of ODP" but the fact is that there are thousands of active editors, each with their own motives, and there really isn't an overall tendentious pattern. What particular motive was in mind depends on the editor and the day. (Sometimes I just like to whack spam. Sometimes I notice improper listings while checking to see if new submissions are unique. Sometimes I notice egregious hype, and when I start looking at the site to see what its description should be, I notice that there's no unique content to describe. Sometimes some non-editor mentions a listing that looks bad, and I go whack it to help restore the ODP's reputation. It is really, VERY, VERY seldom that I remove a site because it's a competitor, or I don't like the webmaster, or I've been bribed.

This is a good place to contact an editall (who would be able to change all the descriptions.) And if you have mass site reorgs like this, it's a good idea to try to coordinate the updates. Please don't do this very often, though....it's not just ODP links that get broken.

>>Funny, I don't think I'd intentionally pick a name that rhymes with moron. Yes, but nobody called YOU "xtupid."

This is a troll, right? You can't be using a keyboard without having grasped the concept of alphabetical order. Christianity is at the same level as the other major religion categories. And nobody in their right mind would propose sorting the categories by how large they are....lessee, United States, Business, Arts, Business, California, Texas (the order of these two swapping frequently due to ODP editor rivalry), Music... right. Quick, find Shakespeare, is it before or after Richmond, Virginia (this week)?

>Perhaps, an editor took a quick look and did not see all the free services and content that we offer. Could we get someone to take a closer look? This is certainly a possibility. (And it sounds like some editors think it's worth a second look.) But think about this--is a casual visitor likely to look that much harder for the content? If the editor misses it, so might your customers. Hint, hint: you very likely probably almost-more-than-certainly need to put some more work into your navigation. [This is not at all unusual--spending more time on graphical bells and whistles and not enough time on functionality is probably the most common disastrous design decision made by website designers. Perhaps it's because so many of them are primarily graphic artists, not user interface designers.] But it doesn't matter why -- the fact is, you'll lose most of your visitors this way.

You don't mention what description you suggested. (We find that many people, with what we assume is the best will in the world, simply CAN'T write a guidelines-conforming description.) But in any case, the site has been rejected. It is hard to find any "unique" content at the site. Certainly the title (Blackjack Games Downloads) is about content that is already listed (via sites owned by the content creators). Perhaps your description also featured content which the reviewer recognized as not unique, and this may have contributed to its rejection. Or perhaps there isn't any unique content: this would be grounds for rejection. The steps to getting a site added are: 1) Have unique content (you'd be amazed how large a majority of submitters skip this step. 2) Feature that unique content prominently in the site navigation (many affiliate-business-model sites skip this, if they didn't skip step 1 already. 3) Find the category corresponding to that unique content (again, the pencil-seller-site submitted to "Arts/Literature/Writers_Resources" is an all-too-common type of stupidity that will be considered abuse by the victims, that is, us editors.) 4) Feature the unique content in the suggested site description. (This will tell the editor what to look for, and provides the best assurance that it won't get overlooked.)

A "deep link" is a URL that doesn't point to the "home page" of a site -- usually, this means contains something more than just a domain name [optionally followed by "index.htm" or the like.] It "addresses some page deep inside the site", not its "main entry point." A site that has pages (or subdirectories) with information on several different topics might have each such page or subdirectory listed separately (and directly) under several different categories. This would be "deeplinking". The guidelines say "deep linking is the exception" -- that is, the deep links in a category should be consistently of significantly higher value (quality of content) than the minimum required for a site listed in the same category. In practice, this means that certain kinds of sites (e.g. online retail sites) are "basically never" deeplinked, while others (e.g., encyclopedias, newspapers, large "conglomerate" corporations, newsgroups or etext archives, universities) are "frequently" deeplinked.

This is, I'm afraid, a bit of a catch-22. If it is ODP search, as has been often said, nobody cares that it's not a full-featured consumer-friendly search. If it is NOT ODP search, then ... we have no control. The RDF contains category names (which of course include city and state for regional categories), and the SEs may use that information in any way that they wish. TODAY, nobody seems to be doing much with it. TOMORROW, someone may see a competitive advantage in making still more effective use of the RDF, like Google did several years ago. IN THE MEANTIME, the truth is in there. Please don't ask us to replicate that information by hand on every one of over-three-quarters-of-a-million listings. And, of course, don't even think about asking us to treat your listing different from the other 785,000 listings...

Re: What to do if site not accepted after 4 months >>The main innovate.com site is just a corporate identity site, and contains no information about any of those products (just links). To get information on any of those, one must leave the innovate.com site to visit each product site individually. That is irrelevant to the information flow: "website" is not synonymous with "domain." We recognize cases of single domains holding hundreds of websites (Geocities) or single websites with hundreds of doorway domains, or (as in your case) separate domains for each product (book publishers sometimes create a new domain for each "big-ticket-marketing" book they publish. such domains are not listed.) One company, basically one line of business, generally will get one listing, and it should make sure that all its content, on any domain, is easily navigable from its home page.

Another point about affiliate content: if the content that makes a site relevant to a category is affiliate, then it doesn't matter how much other content it has. That site is not listable there. For example: in a category called "Loan Services", a site has 20,000 pages of unique information about loan service providers, but the only way a user can actually get Loan_Services from that site is to follow a link off-site, then that site is not a Loan_Services site! And it doesn't even matter if the off-site links AREN'T affiliate-tagged -- remember, we don't care about your business model, we care about our information flow model. Such a site might be considered for listing under Consumer Information because of all that other content, but NEVER under Loan Services.

I'll try not to, now that I know. I haven't kept up with inktomi, for some reason. I don't know whether it's because doesn't drive any major portals of any conceivable interest, or because their search results for reference-type searches never were any good anyway. I always felt like the query engine always added "& free spam!" to the end of my search string. But I'm sure you SERP perps still want access to the audience held captive by MSN and/or the Infernal-Exploder-Invalid-URL scams, so this is valuable information. Question, though: does Inktomi index the ODP descriptions for the ODP category page (like Google does) or for the home page of the listed site?

>>I play by the rules, I am proud of the fact that I have optimized my website by making the rules work for me. By using this forum I though I was playing by the rules to get your help. No criticism of your procedure is implied. It would be only prudent to consider the effect of the text on your site on likely search keywords. And your requested description is, frankly speaking, pristine and coherent compared to SOME that we see. It's because this is such a big problem for so many submitters that we take the opportunity to explain why we can't do what so many of you guys want (or at least, how strongly we feel that it shouldn't be done.)

>>How does the suggested description lessen the efforts of the ODP to provide relevant and meaningful information to it's users. This is a fair question. I'm not sure that I can answer it verbally: it would be like sort of like explaining chicken-sexing in Morse Code. In fact, like many other editors, I started out acutely conscious of how my descriptions would affect keyword searches. But I think I can promise that after you've looked at 100,000 descriptions and reviewed 10,000 sites, you too will see how much keyword-packing would degrade the readability and information content of those descriptions.

Check out http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Directories/Open_Directory_Project/Use_of_ODP_Data/Upload_Tools/ . As always, if you know sites featuring tools not listed here, submit them!

If the main actual content is articles, and your site navigation allows the articles to be readily visible from the home page, then you can submit the main site to a category for which most of the articles are relevant. Then concentrate on building the rest of the site out around that topic. Focus is the key to a successful small site--not just in the directories, but for users also.

>>Is there nothing that I can do to have this one agent per city site listed? The problem is not with your submittal procedure. The problem is with the content on the site. Editors, each of whom has reviewed dozens (or hundreds) of sites with content like this, agree that it is best for our users to treat these sites, as consistently as possible, by the suck-n-spit method mentioned above. Sometimes inexperienced editors add the sites, but no listing is guaranteed permanently -- a small directory is always liable to suck-spit-deletion.

>>These search engines will use the keywords in the title and description provided by the DMOZ to determine relevance. Not currently true. And it would be futile to guess what the search engines will use tomorrow. It's what's on the page (and, in Google's case at least) what's on the text of links to the page, that determines relevance. The ODP Title (NOT the description) does link to the page, but for commercial sites, the ODP site title must be the business name -- editors have very little leeway there, for many very good reasons. Now an ODP listing may get your site spidered or indexed by the search engines. That's nice for you, smart of the search engines perhaps, but in either case not something we are allowed to be concerned with--this is a frequently-re-emphasized staff decision, and is not likely to change. Although some of us are (justly, I think) proud of the ODP's contribution to quality of search engine results, the OFFICIAL point of view is that SE use counts as "creative abuse of the RDF dump." We may encourage and appreciate such creativity; we may hope that other people may think of other clever uses; we may be disappointed when some clever ideas are implemented unsuccessfully; but we DESIGN for, and ONLY for, a DIRECTORY. It's NOT the "Open Keyword Collection Project." It's not the "Open Search Engine Project" or even the "Open Search Engine Fodder Project." It's not the "Open Search Engine Website Submittal and Promotion Project." It doesn't need to be any of those things for its builders to consider it valuable to their target audience. It doesn't need to be commercially valuable to anyone, for its volunteers to care about it. It's just the ODP, for whatever it's worth.

"I LOVE hype! I'll take your hype! I'm having hype, hype, hype, bacon, eggs, and hype!" Sorry, but this is a truly awful description. Let me reshuffle the words a bit to illustrate a small part of what I mean. A non-chlorine [product] ... using copper and silver ionization! Well, duh. algae control [product] to [drumroll, please] ... prevent algae! [but, inquiring minds want to know, does it really inhibit algae growth also?] In swimming pools, koi ponds, hot tubs, or spas. [presumably, the site contains a patented java application that automatically blocks anyone who might consider attempting to use the product in a tepid tub or a goldfish pond? Because if not, this information is in no conceivable way related to a review of the site!] So that description has almost nothing to do with information, and everything to do with keyword-stuffing. And the worst of it is, in the current search engine climate, the ODP description is less effective as a cavity to keyword-stuff than even META tags. This description is worth a detailed critique, not because of this one site [i could find dozens of worse examples in a few minutes search of the Unreviewed queues], but because, well, I could find dozens of worse examples.... and perhaps this will give other webmasters an idea of the kind of initial impression they are giving with their Business-Degree "Marketing-to-Dummies 101" rules: "repeat all your important words three times" "develop a personal relationship with the victim by addressing them personally and patronizing their tastes and desires" "tell the target victims exactly what to do and when to do it NOW!" It is NOT a mild impression. And it is NOT a favorable impression. ODP ideals are different. Don't repeat any words unless the syntax requires it--we're building a directory for readers, not keyword-fodder for search engines (that's what your own website is). Don't tell anyone where to go or what to do there--not our business, we're providing a roadmap, not directions. Avoid first OR second personal pronouns--ODP editors (who are responsible for the site descriptions) can't speak for the URL submitter -- let alone the webmaster -- and don't know the surfer. Please don't take this personally. I have done some technical writing professionally. But I haven't taken the marketing courses, and I couldn't write marketing copy to save my life. (I know: I've tried, to help friends.) And so I can imagine that the ideals of "technical" or "objective" informational writing style may be just as difficult or impossible for people with a background in, or mindset for, persuasive writing. So I know that we can't reasonably expect all site submitters, webmasters or not, to be able to write adequate site descriptions. But we can try to explain the guidelines WE have -- they are simple enough to recognize, if not always easy to implement -- so that webmasters will know what to expect to happen to their suggested description. And I can say that we appreciate webmasters' attempts to sympathize with, and write to our guidelines -- even if we change them, we change them MUCH more sympathetically.

What you see on dmoz.org is basically what you get in the RDF: category name, URL, site title, site description. What the search engines DO with that is strictly up to them. AOL used to index category name, now they don't. Google never did, at least directly. I don't know of any major SE using site description or site title directly (unlike at, say, Yahoo, where sites whose description or title match your search are given high priority.) But since many SEs spider copies of the Open Directory, the directory pages with site descriptions and titles show up on many searches, which is even better for the user (they find the right category, no matter WHICH site's description happened to contain the particular synonym they used as a search key.) AOL is of course in a state of flux right now; Google is always tweaking their algorithm. So any of this that happens to be true today, may be inoperative tomorrow. I'm not convinced the SEs have yet figured out how to get the full benefit of the RDF. [Teoma hasn't started using it at all...an oversight they will surely repair when they realize how much Google has benefited from it. Or they too will be crushed under the cycles of the googlenaut.]

Well, like, for the money. Pornmeisters are always looking for domains with proven search-engine attraction. All right, I'll try to be serious for a moment. But I'm still not sure this request that you are making (whether or not it's good for the directory) will do what you want. See, ADDING the words "Search Engine" to the ODP DESCRIPTION isn't going to affect search results that are dependent on YOUR page's text -- that is, most of them. Nor will it affect search results that are dependent on some copy of the ODP RDF (that is, the "Search Engines/Premium Services" pages of the Google Open Directory, Netscape Open Directory, etc., etc.) Since the ambiguous word "submission" is still there, the pages will still get returned. And, in fact, since the RDF-copied pages ALREADY include the words "Search Engines" prominently in the title, the mere presence of those words demonstrably isn't going to protect you from the brain-damaged part of the W&C community. (In fact, since this forum is indexed by Google, the B.D.,W&Cers are now going to find it with searches like "whips chains submission.") There is no protection against inveterate user stupidity.

Not really. The standard recommended practice for editing "small directory sites" submitted like this is to "suck out the links, spit out the hull." There is a simple reason for this. In order to be a useful addition to the _Open Directory_, a directory site has to have something unique and inimitable...otherwise, why not just use the Open Directory?