A year plus?...is this the USSR?

Don't read too much into the second comment. All sorts of suspicious activity triggers investigations. We spot many spammers because, DUH, they spam us!

Blinds.com...for the record

I am the founder and president of NoBrainerBlinds.com and Blinds.com.

Having just read all your recent lively posts, it looks like one of my employees has stirred things up.

First, the tone of Daniel’s original post was inappropriate and I apologize for that (he really did start a few weeks ago).

Second, it’s clear that DMOZ is among the few elite directories, so he naturally felt we should be listed, and here’s why.

I have been selling blinds online I think longer than anyone else…starting in June, 1995.

If you do a search for ‘blinds’ in 1996 usenet postings you’ll see scores of posts with my helpful advice. A search on my name comes up with many favorable articles, interviews, and stories written about me and my company’s success.

The point is that we are legitimate, reputable, and customer-driven, and we should be listed in reputable directories, like DMOZ.

Our Blinds.com site was launched in late 2004 and is certainly either the leading blinds site, or at least one of the top 3. Although evidently sales are not considered.

Please "randomly" look at our Blinds.com site, compare it to all the others already listed, then make a decision.

Yes, we already have many top-10 natural rankings and we’re rising all the time. But DMOZ is DMOZ, and we should be there.

Yes, we’ve tried to submit before. Are you sure the ‘animation submission’ was OURS?! That’s too weird and if so, I again apologize, as there's just no reason we'd want to be there.

When we saw no results from earlier submissions, we tried again.
Spamming; no way. Only an ardent attempt.

Yes, we have a few sites, including: NoBrainerBlinds.com, BlindsWholesale.com, and Blinds.com. But each is unique and serves a different type of customer.

I think all of them should be listed.

But upon review, if an editor decides that only one should be listed, then please choose Blinds.com.

It is by far the most comprehensive, easiest to navigate, and includes many useful articles and advice.

If we have violated the submission rules, then it was unintentional.

I hope this clears things up.

Regards,

Jay

Yes, we have a few sites, including: NoBrainerBlinds.com, BlindsWholesale.com, and Blinds.com. But each is unique and serves a different type of customer.

Click to expand...

I think all of them should be listed.

Click to expand...

At best, one. At worst none.

If we have violated the submission rules, then it was unintentional.

Click to expand...

You, or your representative have done so. Repeatedly. And to a degree that has raised a lot of suspicions.

I hope this clears things up.

Click to expand...

Perhaps so, but there is still at least one point that, from our perspective, needs to be made explicit.

Now I'm not going to beat you up -- I suspect that when you read this thread you did that to yourself -- but I am fairly plain spoken, so don't take offense at anything that follows.

We will not list your site, or undertake the editorial review that is a precursor to being listed, as a result of the postings here.

To do so would be patently unfair because it would unfairly reward webmasters (not just you or your company, this is a broadly applied concept) who some in here and stir the pot. What has occurred is that the relationship between the multiple sites has been identified and noted (we call them fraternal mirrors even though they are not mirrors in the classic sense) and when an editor does get around to reviewing the site (and it could be in 5 minutes or 3 years, we have no way of telling) the cross-site relationships will have been identified. The past submissions to both relevant and irrelevant sites are history and are documented. Hopefully, there are no more submissions out there, since any additional ones we stumble upon (especially to wildly irrelevant categories) would only serve to cement the suspicions that have already been raised.

If I might be so bold as to suggest that if you, or your team, can think of any additional submissions of any of those three websites, it might be in your enlightened self interest to share any information that comes to light, so that we can appropriately handle them and, at the same time, see our suspicions lowered as a result of the disclosure.

I, for one, appreciate that you came here and shared the history as you see it. You gained major credibility points with this editor (I don't know if they are worth anything, but you gained them nonetheless.)

I hope this helps as it was composed in the spirit of helpfulness.

Yes, thanks for the disclosure. People don't do this very often, but I did convince one person to do it some months ago (probably more than a year): I cleaned up after him, as spectregunner mentioned has been done here (but, as he also mentioned, I was uncomfortable going beyond doing that -- just clearing the history, so that when in the normal course of events the site was reviewed, it wouldn't be prejudiced). I have since heard from the (non-ODP) grapevine that THAT site has been listed.

So, thanks again for helping us get that straightened out. We're much more interested in building a clean directory than in punishing offenders, so it takes pretty serious abuse to get more than just shunned; and I hope what we've accomplished here keeps even that from happening.

Thanks for the partial disclosure Jay. I'll charitably assume that you didn't mention http://www.aablinds.com because it currently redirects to http://www.blinds.com/ .

Your original listing of http://www.blindswholesale.com has now been restored.

If you own any other blind related domain names, I urge you to disclose them now. We're unlikely to be lenient if we discover them for ourselves later.

Blinds.com...for the record

Thank you for listening.
The responses to my post are appreciated.

Regarding the notion of “full disclosure” , aablinds.com is a domain name we bought maybe 4 or 5 years ago, as it had been abandoned by apparently some other blinds retailer. It used to have some natural rankings for some keywords, so a $20 price for a few visitors seemed worth it. This is a strategy used by most of the top Web retailers.

It seems to be beside the point though, because aablinds.com is not a stand-alone Web site, and I have no interest in having it listed in the ODP or any other directory.
I seriously doubt we ever tried (maybe the original owner tried?).

In any case, my company does own other domains in a similar vein and we have no interest in listing them.

Now here’s the part I don’t understand.
Even if the Web sites are stand-alones, I see no reason why legitimate Web sites, even if owned by the same company and in the same line of business, can’t all be listed.

Here’s just a couple of examples to make the point:
DMOZ now lists thegap.com, bananarepublic.com, and oldnavy.com – all owned by Gap, Inc. and they all sell clothes.

These travel sites:Expedia, Hotwire, and Tripadvisor are all owned by iac.com and are all listed by DMOZ.

As an immediate measure, I thought I would go through your established protocol for “Updating Your Site” at http://dmoz.com/add.html to amend our URL from BlindsWholesale.com to Blinds.com. I hope you think that’s reasonable.

Jay

Yes, "Update URL" is reasonable. The editor will check the OLD URL to make sure the new one is really correct, so make sure that site hints that the other one is the real (new) home page.

And yeah, we've seen the problem of site/company consolidation before. We listed ccnow.com and cdnow.com before the latter bought the former. The travel-doorway industry has consolidated since we listed those sites; it may be time to revisit them.

>Even if the Web sites are stand-alones, I see no reason why legitimate Web sites, even if owned by the same company and in the same line of business, can’t all be listed.

The point isn't whether YOU see a reason NOT to list them, it's whether WE see a reason TO list them. And we definitely don't.

They can, and they should be listed -- on the home page of the company's site.

But -- if the company won't even list them, why should WE list them?

And if the company DOES list them, then ... surfers can get there from the page we do list, so ... it's no benefit to them for us to list the other subsites individually, so ... why should we list them?

It all boils down to the same thing. There is no reason to list them.

But there's a very good reason NOT to list them. We do make decisions based on the absolute necessity of giving editors moral support against spammers. And this is one of the most fundamental of those decisions -- not only do we not list multiple "related" sites, we have the right to apply the most serious of all ODP penalties against anyone who submits them. And, speaking from bitter experience in the trenches, we absolutely do need that protection. And that's far more than reason enough.

An extra word of explanation (if it is needed).

We treat a collection of related pages, folders, subdomains, and domains as comprising "one site". That "one site" gets "one listing".

Some people try to hide their content over multiple domains. The more you spread it, the more it looks like spam to us.

If you submit "one URL" then that might be listed.

If you submit more than "one URL" then we exercise the right to use the "or less" option from the relevant .... "a site may be eligible for one listing, or less, in the ODP" ... part of the editing guidelines.

Submitting, per the protocal?

OK, thanks for all the clarifications.

In order to abide by what we believe are the ODP guidelines, we have taken our old URL (from BlindsWholesale) and have made a clear notation under the masthead that it is "A Blinds.com Company". Then we used the "Update URL" procedure to replace BlindsWholesale with our new URL, Blinds.com.

By writing here we are NOT asking for preferential treatment - nor asking for your approval of the steps we've taken. Only to write that I believe we are following the established procedure, and to let ODP know that if not, then it is unintentional.

Thanks again.
Jay

Yes, all we need is some sort of confirmation on the ground. And that is ONE reasonable way of providing it. (It's not the only way. We really aren't in the position of requiring doorway pages to be set up this way or that -- we just want some way to make sure someone doesn't use "Update URL" maliciously to hijack an existing listing.)

Update URL followup

Just making sure we’re on track with our "Update URL" process. We thought we’d followed the proper procedure so that our Blinds.com site would replace the BlindsWholesale.com site previously listed in the ODP.

However, it appears instead that our new site, Blinds.com, has not been listed, and that BlindsWholesale.com has been replaced with Blinds Acquisition, LLC (still pointing to BlindsWholesale).

Blinds Acquisition, LLC is our corporate name (not a Web site) and not relevant to consumers.

Any insight or advice?

Blinds Acquisition, LLC is our corporate name

Click to expand...

http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/describing.html#titles says:

Do give the official name of the business or entity as the title, if the site is about the business, organization, or other entity (e.g. a company's home page).

Therefore the current title is correct.

The ODP policy is to list corporate names. The thinking behind it is probably the problem of single entities spinning off swarms of product-line/brand-name doorway websites -- which require a very firm demurral. But I'd say that the identity of the product supplier is of all things most relevant to potential purchasers of the product.

We list companies with their legal name (in this case Blinds Acquisition, LLC ).
It seems that due to the bad history of spammy submissions the editor who reviewed the request (which was not done in the proper way, a suggestion is not an update request) didn't find a reason to change the url. [keep in mind only a very small amount of editors are active here at R-Z]

URL update

"# Do give the official name of the site as the title. Generally, the title will be obvious and prominently displayed on the site.

# Do give the official name of the business or entity as the title, if the site is about the business, organization, or other entity (e.g. a company's home page)."

Since the site is not a 'company home page' or 'about a business', but is instead a retail storefront, doesn’t it make sense to follow the first rule (name of the site)? In our case that would be Blinds.com.

For this reason, the large majority of retail sites listed on DMOZ (e.g. LendingTree, Expdedia, Servicemagic) are listed under the site name, not the corporate name (e.g. IAC). We're not trying to get multiple names listed like IAC, but just to have one url/name listed (the right one -- Blinds.com).

In addition to listing us under the wrong name, it also points to the wrong URL (blindswholesale...as opposed to Blinds.com).

Should it be deemed that our legal name (Blinds Acquisition LLC) must still be listed instead of our Web site name, then at a minimum shouldn't the target link be to our primary site, Blinds.com?

We thought that all the correct info was in the "update url" request we made per the suggestions of the group and believe it was done in the proper way. Thank you.

Because http://www.blindswholesale.com/ is still functional any request to change the listed URL would be declined.

It would be a different matter if http://www.blindswholesale.com/ had a permanent redirect to http://www.blinds.com .

I stress the word permanent. A temporary redirect for the purpose of obtaining a listing change would confirm our earlier suspicions and trigger an appropriate reaction.

Note that the site is really about a company -- as for any other site offering goods or services, what else could it be about, but the entity that provides the goods and services?

URL request

Fair enough. So assuming that the title stays as is...can it point to our primary site -- blinds.com? That's the 'url request' we made. We think it's a better user experience.