Changed URL?

Hi. My wife's website, www.annekrinsky.com, was accepted on Jan. 15 under /Arts/Visual_Arts/Painting/Painters/Abstractism/K/. That is the URL it is registered under, and which appears on several art sites, as well as her c.v.

At first, DMOZ listed the URL as http://krinsky.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk, which is the URL our ISP uses (we redirect the site to our ISP because it offers a "free" website with our Internet subscription). I contacted one of the DMOZ editors and within hours, the listing was changed to www.annekrinsky.com. Soon, it began appearing on some major search engines, which was great.

However, in the last week or so, another editor apparently changed it back. I'm hoping that it can revert back to www.annekrinsky.com. This is not some big commercial website belonging to someone famous; my wife is a hard-working artist who is just trying to promote her work at minimal cost via a website that carries her name.

We both appreciate the volunteer efforts of the DMOZ community and are hoping you will review our case once again.

Thanks!

Whenever possible, we list the root URL, rather than the vanity URL. This eliminates the redirect, and makes maintenance of the directory much easier. There are also other considerations (nothing specific to your site) that are not appropriate do discuss here.

You are, of course, free to promote either URL as you choose in other directories or search engines.

spectre is correct. It is DMOZ policy not to list URLs which redirect to another domain (and to avoid URLs that redirect within the same domain if possible), so in this case we would list your Blueyonder URL as opposed to your .com domain. Sorry, but that's how it is.

I see. I assume that if I didn't redirect (and paid my registrar, which offers web hosting) I could then get the URL changed on DMOZ, right?
Thanks again...

Yes, you could do that.

Just a general note: if you submitted the redirector-URL (and we changed it) and then make it a non-redirector, you could have it changed back - that is right.

But if you would set up a third domain and make it a nonredirector, we would normally refuse the change. Why? Because checking that this is no attempt to hijack a site, is to much work. If we did allow this, people would start mirroring sites they want delisted, submit an Update Request, wait until it is done and change the content.

It doesn't look to be a redirect. You need to change your links on the webpage to include the domain you wish to use:

http://krinsky.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/index.html changes to http://www.annekrinsky.com/

http://krinsky.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/series5.html changes to http://www.annekrinsky.com/series5.html

...etc.

Actually, it is a redirect to my ISP (blueyonder). As far as I know, I can't make the changes you suggest from my end; they are made by blueyonder when I upload the site to them. (If I'm wrong on this, please let me know!)

Then we will have to list the blueyonder URL.

Hi Stecklow,
Sorry to interfere, I was just browsing, being nosey - lol

You said "As far as I know, I can't make the changes you suggest from my end; they are made by blueyonder when I upload the site to them. (If I'm wrong on this, please let me know!)"

If you built the site yourself (or had it built for you) and then "sent" the html pages to blueyonder to upload to your server then yes - you are wrong.

Your site links are set up using an image map, all the links are listed at the foot of your html pages and use 'relative urls' (meaning the browser searches for the url from it's current place)
For Example:
The first link reference says: href="contactslinks.html"
If you change that to an 'absolute url' by adding "http://www.annekrinsky.com/" to the start of the link, so it becomes: href="http://www.annekrinsky.com/contactslinks.html"
then do the same for all the other links on there, then send the new pages to blueyonder to upload, you will achieve what jswafford suggested.

It looks as if the domain name server points to blueyonder as your host - which is not a redirect but the normal way to 'locate' a domain.

Blueyonder assigns "internal" ref's to each of your pages (so in effect they 'mirror' the site+username) but if your domain were to stop linking to the 'blueyonder page copies' nobody would know they exist

There is evidence to support this:

If you type that url (full version) in to your browser bar you will see that the page exists but has never been found by google because there isn't a link on the www pointing to it!
If you go to the blueyonder copy of the page google have found that - because your domain index page has a link to it. (Of course you won't be able to see that unless you have a google toolbar - just take my word for it)!

Sorry for the huge post, hope that helps

You dont want to do that without the 301 redirect as Google might see the site as a mirror of itself and penalize. I accidently mirrored one of my client's site and Google penalized it with 0 page rank for about a year. Be careful.

Thanks for everyone's help on this. I believe I made all of the suggested html link changes on my menu (i.e., series1.html now says http://www.annekrinsky.com/series1.html, etc.).
If I missed something, please let me know.

As a fellow webmaster (and not as a ODP editor) I advice you not to continue with these changes. Your content is still located at http://krinsky.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/series1.html . Most search engines, and certainly Google, will notice this. And very probably punish your listing with either a low rating or possibly a banishment. If you want http://www.annekrinsky.com to be your site you must find a hosting company for your domain and not a redirect servive.

Stecklow - It looks good to me.
thehelper - a pr0 from google is not a penalty, it's a pr0.
A penalised site would show a grey bar (not listed).
pvgool - I disagree: Google have both sites listed but show no relationship between them and Google don't 'punish' with a low pr, they either list you or ban you - check their FAQ!
Blueyonder isn't a redirect service, it's an isp that offers free webhosting to it's own customers.

You can find a really good place to discuss this type of issue at one of these web marketing forums. In these forums you can get the opinions of many different people who do this sort of thing for a living. We can really only answer questions about dmoz effectively here.

In my opinion it would be more important to put ALT tags to all images than worry about the domain name.

Your home page for example has no text at all. Why worry about search engines when there is nothing to index...

You're right, sorry - I was trying to help him overcome his specific problem and keen to make sure he wasn't misinformed.
As far as the site content is concerned, I didn't comment because I figured this wasn't the place for it

Well, I've now added a whole bunch of ALT tags to my site. Thanks for the tip.

What I'm still confused by, after reading all of these helpful messages, is the difference between a redirect service and a web hosting service. The registrar for my site, for example, offers hosting, but it's through a third party called Entryhost. If I sign up with that, wouldn't that just mean I'd end up having my site listed in search engines as krinsky.entryhost.com, or something like that? That doesn't seem any different from what I've got now.

Bottom line: I'm still unclear how to make sure I end up with just one URL, namely www.annekrinsky.com.

I am not familiar with Entryhost, but the main difference would be (I assume) that your domain name would be pointing directly to your content and not redirecting to other domain. I am quite sure if you contact Entry host they can confirm to you if your domain will re-direct or not.

We are already talking about issues not for this forum, so I would advice to talk to Entryhost and get 5.95 hosting with domain that would normally get you end result you seem to want. If for some reason they do not provide that service, I can point out that Pair.com offers what you want with same price. Good luck!

Sorry to take you off-track, forum-wise. I think I've got it figured out now. Thanks again.