Bplans.com listing

Hi, I wasn't sure if this should go in this forum or in site submission, so I thought I'd post it here. If it should be posted in site submissions, let me know.

One of our company's sites, http://www.bplans.com/, was previously listed in Business/Small_Business/Finance/Business_Plans/ but has recently disappeared from the category. I asked a friend who is an ODP editor in a totally unrelated area about it. He said he looked up the URL and it was flagged. I asked him what that meant, and he said it had a note on it that our company was already listed at http://www.paloaltosoftware.com/ in Computers/Software/Business/Management/. Because we were already listed, http://www.bplans.com/ and http://www.mplans.com/ (another site of ours) should not be listed because our company was already listed elsewhere.

The problem is that these sites have totally different content, and all are very valuable sites. I understand that you're not supposed to have the same site at multiple URLs listed, but if you visit http://www.bplans.com/ you'll see that the content is entirely different from our company site already listed. Our company site that's listed is a site that just sells our software products. Bplans.com is a HUGE free content resource that is the most popular business planning content site on the web. It has lots of free tools, expert advice, free online book, articles, and lots of free sample business plans. None of this information is on our company site. Bplans.com comes up in the top 10 for every business plan keyword on search engines, and has thousands of links from other sites on the web. Thus showing it's value and importance as judged the web as a whole. It just seems to me if the goal of ODP is to help people find quality sites in a content area, that Bplans.com should be listed in it's category, regardless if the company that owns the site has an unrelated site already listed. The same argument can be made for Mplans.com.

So my question is, what course of action can or should I take with this? Am I just out of luck? The sites are already totally different, with tons of unique content that is valuable to people. I'm not sure what else I could do.

Thanks.

>The problem is that these sites have totally different content, ... the content is entirely different from our company site already listed. Our company site that's listed is a site that just sells our software products. Bplans.com ...has lots of free tools, expert advice, free online book, articles, and lots of free sample business plans. None of this information is on our company site.
OK, what you're accused of having is not a "mirror" (the same content on multiple sites) nor yet a "fraternal mirror" (very similar content on multiple sites), nor even a "doorway domain" (hardly any content except links to another domain) but only a "vanity domain name" -- that is, a domain name that doesn't correspond to a whole website, but to a particular page (or pages) within a website. In other words, what the editor seems to consider as "one big site" is spread over URLs in three different domains.

That's allowed (as if we could tell anyone else what to name their individual pages anyway!) but WE don't have to treat it as three WEBSITES just because it has three DOMAIN NAMES. It would have just as good a legitimate chance at a deserved deeplink if the content were all under one domain name. (Well, maybe better, since "vanity domain names" represent a common "sneaky spamming" technique, and the second name automatically raises suspicion and hackles which, however unjustifiably, cannot help but affect the initial attitude toward the content.)
This isn't meant to address the question about whether your request for additional listings is justified. It's just to define the issues that need to be addressed.

Another important issue is "uniqueness". Some of that content is not unique, some seems to be. In such cases, the editor has to go through a lot of work to determine if the amount of unique content is large enough to be significant, and then whether it's large enough to be listable. The problem you face here is that, frankly, in my opinion, having established rather easily that the content's not ALL unique, it's not worth the editing trouble to investigate a large sample of the pages, all for the sake of content that is, after all, already reachable from the directory. There are other sites that need reviewing, and this one (because of the uniqueness issue) CAN'T "obviously meet the exceptional-content bar" for deeplinks.

Thanks for the reply!

Well, I see your point, however, I disagree that these are just vanity domains. Bplans.com has existed as a seperate site from PaloAlto.com since 1997 and was previously listed in the ODP. I don't expect an editor to know that of course, but that was just for your information. It is the biggest and highest traffic business planning site on the web, and it does in fact have tons of unique content. In fact, that's all it is! The only thing that's actually similar to PaloAlto.com is that they both have a picture of our software product on it. PaloAlto.com does not contain any sample business plans, any free tools, any expert advice, a planning glossary, any articles, or anything else of the sort that Bplans.com has. All that content is entirely unique to Bplans.com, and I feel that should be apparent to an editor who even takes 1-2 minutes to look at it because none of that content exists on PaloAlto.com, which is all software information and sales. It seems to me that Bplans.com should qualify for a quality content link, and that we would be WORSE off by trying to put it under one domain name. It's never existed as one domain name, the sites have always been seperate. If the editor also looked at it in comparison to the content for the other sites listed in the category, I think they'd be able to tell that it's a seperate site. I'm even trying to look at it from an unbiased manner. It seems strange to me that the site would get pulled after it already was in the directory.

If this is the stance the ODP takes, than how can any one company have more than one web site in the directory no matter what the content on those sites consists of? I've seen plenty of sites in the directory that are the same exact URL listed in multiple categories. Yet we have three high quality content sites with different focuses with only one of them listed? That just doesn't seem to make sense to me.

So, your advice would be to do nothing then? As long as both sites are owned by one company we're screwed? I don't really know what we could do to make them "more unique" besides take off the picture of our product (which is small and is just an advertisement).

Thanks for looking into this, I appreciate your time and advice.

I think I didn't make myself clear about the "non-unique" content. I didn't mean that it was duplicated at your other site (as you say, the two domains don't overlap content: they are not "mirrors".) I meant that some of the "free resources" were duplicated elsewhere on the web.

Presumably you won't object to us removing http://www.paloalto.com/, http://www.palo-alto.com/, http://www.paloalto.co.uk/, http://www.cashplanpro.com/, http://www.bizplans.com/, http://www.businessplanpro.com/, http://www.pasware.com/, http://www.marketingplanpro.com/, http://www.webstrategypro.com/ and any other sites you might have like them. Those ones are clearly mirrors.

Hi - Thanks to everyone who has participated in this discussion. For full disclosure, I am an employee of Palo Alto Software and am directly affiliated with PaloAlto.com and Bplans.com.

To briefly summarize, we run 4 primary web sites:
1. PaloAlto.com - This is our sales site. We only sell software here, nothing else. There is no free content, tools, or anything else.

2. Bplans.com - This site has over 60 free business plans, free interactive tools, a Q&A area, small business articles, etc.

3. Mplans.com - Same concept as Bplans.com, but dedicated to marketing professionals

4. PaloAlto.co.uk - This is our European operation and is owned and oppereated by a different company. They sell UK editions of our software that are disctinctly different than our US editions. The two sites have the same design, but different products.

The bottom line that people seem to be forgetting is that DMOZ is run for the users. It is not run so that people can follow a set of rules. The mission of dmoz (and any good search engine or directory for that matter) is to direct users to the best content available for their search. This mission seems to have been forgotten here and it is frankly upsetting to see DMOZ go this route. I worked for Yahoo on the surfing team for a number of years, and that directory slowly become completely ineffective because it did not deliver results to users. It was precisly the insistance on following the rules to the letter and not looking at cases individually that caused yahoo to loose it's effectiveness as a directory. If I remember my internet history correctly, that was one of the core reasons DMOZ was started in the first place - to do a better job than yahoo and the other directories out there.

To that end, I am very confused as to why a directory like DMOZ that clearly has intelligent people for editors would make a decision like it has. Palo Alto Software certainly should not have all of it's various mirror sites listed. I completely agree with that statement. But to deny users of finding what are arguably some of the best resources out there seems criminal. The mirror sites that are listed in the previous post should be removed, but our primary domains should remain in the directory so that users can find what they are looking for. Why hide good resources from people who are looking for them?

As a case for bplans.com, let me point out that it has been validated and endorsed by numorous small business sites. The following sites are just examples of some of the people who either link to or host our content:
- Yahoo Small Business (smallbusiness.yahoo.com)
- The Wall Street Journal (www.startupjournal.com)
- Entrepreneur Magazine (www.entrepreneur.com)
- The SBA (www.sba.gov)
- Inc Magazine (www.inc.com)
- etc.

Clearly our content and bplans.com is validated in some way by these endoursements. Our other content site, Mplans.com, contains different content than Bplans and is validated by the same sites listed above as well as several others including the American Marketing Association. Mplans.com should be listed as well as Bplans.com as the content is distintly different.

As for PaloAlto.com, that is a sales site. It is where we sell our software. That should be clear to anyone visiting the site. PaloAlto.co.uk is not a mirror of PaloAlto.com. It sells different products to a different market and should be considered alongside the US site.

I apologize for the long post, but I feel very strongly that users should be able to find the content they are looking for quickly and easily on the web (isn't that why google is so successful?). By refusing to evaluate sites (and pages) individually, dmoz risks becoming irrelevant. As great a resource as DMOZ is and as important as it is to abide by certain standards, the same question should still always be asked whenever a site (or page) is reviewed: Can a user *easily* find this content through another web page?

If the answer is "no" then that page should be listed. Period.

To return to the case of PaloAlto.com and bplans.com, there is no reason why the company and its users should be penalized. Both sites should be listed so that users can find what they are looking for: In the case of PaloAlto.com it is Software, in the case of Bplans.com it is sample business plans and other startup content.

Currently, we are being penalized because as a commercial company we have choosen to invest massive resources creating free business planning content. We purposely separated our sales from our content so that users would have a good experience using our content. Users should be able to find our content if that is what they are looking for - and they should be able to find our software if that is what they are looking for. The bottom line is that our two sites should be listed.

Again, sorry for the long post. I appreciate everyone who took the time to read this.

In order to help you (and anyone else reading) to save time while writing your posts, I'll explain a couple of things.

First of all we're not interested in your business model. We don't care why you chose to seperate the three sites, all we care about is the content on them, nothing else.

Secondly, we're not interested in what other people think about you. We're going to evaluate your site(s) based purely on the content. We don't care that the New York Times lists you as "a great site" or that Yahoo has you at the top of its search pages, or that you come high up in Google for important major search words. We don't care who links to you or who uses your content. All we are interested in is the content itself.

I can see why both of those points are important to you, but they're just not taken into account when we evaluate sites.

Thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated.

My explanation was intended to explain the different content on each of the sites, not the business model behind them. I know DMOZ doesn't care how we make money. That's fine. My only goal is that users be able to find the content that they are looking for in a particular category.

I just hope that an editor takes the time to actually look at our sites. The decisions that have been made so far appear to have been solely made because our company happens to own and opperate two different sites. The decision has unfortunately not been made based on the content of the sites.

The bottom line is that the content is different on the two domains that we opperate. Just becuase they are hosted on the same servers does not mean that the sites shouldn't both be listed.

There are plenty of examples in the category in question that by DMOZ rules should not be listed. I'm certainly not advocating removing these links as they are all useful for users and would be hard to find otherwise. But I would like an explanation as to why the rules work one way for some sites and another way for others.

Some examples:
- http://home3.americanexpress.com/smallbusiness/tool/biz_plan/index.asp (sub-page of americanexpress.com)
- http://www.sba.gov/starting/indexbusplans.html (sub-page of the sba.gov site)
- http://www.smallbusinesspoint.com/BusinessPoint/businessplans.htm (sub-page of smallbusinesspoint.com, a consulting company)
- http://www.soyouwanna.com/site/syws/bizplan/bizplan.html (another sub-page)

My point is that some editor at some point thought that these resources where valuable enough to create deep links to. I think I could find thousands of examples like this throughout the dmoz directory. So, why choose to remove a link to a web site that has good content in this category? If it's about following the rules, then DMOZ needs a good cleaning out.

The reason why people become editors at DMOZ is hopefully not to go on a powertrip denying sites just because they can. It is because the editors truely believe that a human can do a better job at creating a web directory than a computer can. I do subscribe to that belief, but it only works if sites are evaluated on their content. Our sites have not been evaluated on their content.

At the end of the day, hopefully editors are asking themselves: Did I make it easier for users to find good content? I hope the answer to that is always "yes."

[Could an admin move this over to the status forum, please? Thanks]

In response to your brand new thread from today:

However, in looking at the content on the two sites objectively, I think it's clear that http://www.bplans.com/ is a unique resource with tons of content.

Click to expand...

No offense intended but how on earth can you be objective when you own both sites? The very nature of your relationship with them makes you biased. I'd've thought that the postings in this thread were pretty clear on the subject.

Well, I feel that I am capable of objective thought, and disregarding my biases to look at things in an objective way, but I'd prefer to stick to the issue.

If you take a look at the category in question, and compare those sites to the content available on Bplans.com, there isn't much of a comparison in the majority of the cases. The category is also relatively small, it's not like it's overcrowded.

I may be mistaken, but I thought that the purpose of the ODP is to allow web users to find sites that have great content by organizing them into a directory, correct? If so, it seems like this site would deserve to be listed in the category. For example, I invite someone to find a site that has 60 free sample business plans, interactive business planning tools, and a vast database of articles and expert answers on the subject. There isn't a site out there that has more business planning content, and this isn't my bias speaking.

So, the reasons I've been given for it not being listed are:

Reason #1: It's owned by a site that's already listed which means users could find it through the listed site.

Well, the site already listed (http://www.paloalto.com/) is an e-commerce only software site that doesn't contain any free business planning content. There is only one link on the site to Bplans.com, and it's buried in a pulldown menu. So really, users looking for business planning content are not going to find it by going to DMOZ, finding the Computer/Software/Business/Management category and clicking on Palo Alto Software, then clicking our small link in a pulldown to go to Bplans.com. That isn't making it easier for users to find good content. I could also point to many examples of companies with multiple listings in the ODP for sites they own that have seperate domain names.

Reason #2: All our content could be put under one domain

It doesn't make sense to help users by trying to cram all the content into one site. Does CNET put all their content under one domain? How come this forum itself isn't under dmoz.org's domain? Domain names are used to seperate content in a way that makes sense to users. Does it make sense to add a bunch of free business planning content to our software site that sells multiple software products in various content areas? I understand the basic reason behind this argument. There are tons of people that spam the directory by creating mirror or vanity domain names. This isn't what we've done. Bplans.com has existed since 1996 as a business planning content site, http://web.archive.org/web/*/bplans.com. It wasn't just created as a mirror domain or vanity domain to get us more search traffic or a free listing.

Just thought I'd state this in another way. If I'm wrong about the purpose of ODP, let me know. I just see this as a site full of content that is not being shown to users because we have another unrelated site listed.

As dfy writes above "All we are interested in is the content itself." I totally agree with that statement, so I can't see why this site isn't listed. It has better content than anything else in the category.

I believe the ODP side of things has been covered in the previous posts but you never know, someone may feel like dredging it all back up again.

How come this forum itself isn't under dmoz.org's domain?

Click to expand...

Because it isn't an official part of the ODP. It's operated by ODP editors but is not officially endorsed by the ODP itself.

Yes, and I thank ODP editors for taking the time to respond at all, because I know it's a busy and relatively thankless volunteer job that they do.

I guess I'm just asking for someone to review the site again, and possibly have it be an editor who's not involved in this discussion so they have no history on the subject or this discussion. I appreciate ODP for letting me know the reasons for not listing, but I guess I just don't understand how the reasoning holds true for this site:

hutchenson's reason for it not being listed was:

Another important issue is "uniqueness". Some of that content is not unique, some seems to be. In such cases, the editor has to go through a lot of work to determine if the amount of unique content is large enough to be significant, and then whether it's large enough to be listable. The problem you face here is that, frankly, in my opinion, having established rather easily that the content's not ALL unique, it's not worth the editing trouble to investigate a large sample of the pages, all for the sake of content that is, after all, already reachable from the directory. There are other sites that need reviewing, and this one (because of the uniqueness issue) CAN'T "obviously meet the exceptional-content bar" for deeplinks.

Click to expand...

The problem with that reason is that all the content actually is unique and created by us, there are large amounts of it, and it isn't found elsewhere on the web, unless we've licensed it to a partner of Bplans.com explicitly. So I'm not sure how hutchenson "established rather easily that the content's not ALL unique". It IS unique and not easily found through the directory, which is why I can't accept that reason very easily.

And as I pointed out above, dfy said

All we are interested in is the content itself.

Click to expand...

To which I agree, which is why I don't see why the site shouldn't be listed. It has more business planning content than any other site in the category, but now I'm just repeating myself. Thanks for your time.

As for determining uniqueness, as is my usual practice I did several search engine searches for other sites with the same content. For an admittedly small sample, I found some of that content on other sites, and failed to find some of that content on any other site.

At that point, my effort of determining "exactly how much of the content was unique" outweighed my estimate of the value to our users of "adding another not-entirely-unique deeplink of an already-listed site."

Webmasters should be aware that ODP editors will not visit every page of a site. For a directory, we'll sample a few links to see if they work, and point to valuable and unique content. A site in which (to pick an example from _other_ sites, so as not to appear personal) 1 of 3 links _doesn't_ work, or that contains several businesses in a category where the ODP already lists dozens, or features a product line that is really an affiliate link -- is going to be deleted out-of-hand. We're not going to look at all 30,000 product pages to be sure there's not a single bit of unique content!

There's no harm in web-publishing non-unique content. I've done it myself (although I carefully didn't give it an ODP listing). Having non-unique content is not even a bar to getting an ODP listing. Just make sure, for the sake of the editor and other active web-surfers, that your unique content is prominently featured, and your non-unique content is labelled.

Thanks for the reply and explanation.

If any other site has any content found on Bplans.com they either copied it without our permission, or they are a licensed partner who we've allowed to use it for marketing purposes. Even in that case, it's a very, very small subset of the available content on our site. Of course, I don't expect you to know that off hand, because as you said, you don't have time to do in-depth research. However, because the initial editor who reviewed the site didn't accept it for that reason, does it mean the site has to be excluded indefinitely?

I also understand you won't visit every page, and that time is of the essence when trying to evaluate numerous sites that have been submitted for review. That being said, we have links to unique content on our front page, links to sample plans, tools, etc. So, I'm not sure what more we could actually do to point out this content. because as in your example, our links do work, and we don't have 30,000 product pages to every one page of content. We do link to our software products and other services, but it's built within actual actual unique content. As I'm sure you know, most large content sites owned by businesses do contain advertising or product promotion in some form or another.

So, after looking again did you still feel that it lacked unique content and wasn't worth listing?

Hi Hutcheson,

Any response to my question about it not having enough unique content after looking at it again?

What would be required to do to get it listed? Feature content more prominently?

Thanks for your time.