How did this site get into the ODP?

For fear of sounding petty, I wondered how the site www.fitnessoptions.co.uk managed to get into the category below. After all it is merely a static page - hardly quality content.

Business > Consumer Goods and Services > Sporting Goods > Fitness Equipment

A little annoying when my own sites www.thehealthzone.co.uk or www.one-life.me.uk have not been added in the six months of trying, even though they have pages of useful content.

In the opinion of the editor concerned, it was listable and I'm not about to countermand that. It's a judgement call.

As to thehealthzone.co.uk and one-life.me.uk, we don't list individual sections of a website just because it's been spread across several domain names. onelifedesign.co.uk is listed because that's the best umbrella domain we could find and it links to all your others. For more background on this, please see our submission guidelines (which you acknowledged you'd read and agreed at submission time).

Hi Jim,

Many thanks for your reply.

Maybe a mis-understanding, as I wasn't trying to get www.thehealthzone.co.uk and www.one-life.me.uk into the category above.

More than categories below

http://www.dmoz.org/Health/Fitness/Directories/ for thehealthzone

and

http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/Health/Fitness/Personal_Trainers/ for one life

I think you may have slightly misunderstood jimnobles post as that I believe is what he was trying to cover in his explanation.

You have two seperate domains (http://www.thehealthzone.co.uk/ and http://www.one-life.me.uk/ ) that offer related services/content. I believe what jimnoble meant was that just because the information from the same business is seperated over two domains it does not mean that each site could be considered for a listing in different categories. The choice to spread the content over multiple domains/websites was one of the webmaster and is not something the ODP get involved with.

We would prefer to list ONE site that has access to ALL the information, as oppossed to listing each site, in various categories, all over the directory.

A different way of saying this is: you don't have two sites. You have one site spread out over two vanity domains.

We don't list domains. We list websites. Some domains (geocities) have thousands of websites; some websites have thousands of domain names pointing to them.

When the submittal policies talk about the draconian penalties (banning) for submitting "related sites", that's specifically and explicitly talking about you and what you are doing. We'd prefer not to have to impose that penalty on your sites; you can help us by complying with our guidelines.

But the two sites in question are two completely different sites, different staff, different bank accounts everything. Just look at the content, surely this must be more than just all the sites having the One Life branding.

www.one-life.me.uk - a personal training company in Nottinghamshire thats all it is.
www.thehealthzone.co.uk a health, fitness portal for the UK with thousands on there not just One Life. True it is owned by One Life. But run by completely different staff.

The site you have listed www.onelifedesign.co.uk wasn't even hosted as a website when the above mentioned sites were first submitted, so how can this be an umbrella brand.

Best bit is that i've been trying to list www.one-life.me.uk since last november, yet all my other sites weren't even built until march this year. So how could they be banned before the other sites were created or even hosted.

So much revelation from asking why a static page of little or no use has been accepted into the ODP.

If you would like to know which domains you have listed which use duplicate material and duplicate databases, please ask because you have quite a few. A few quite blatant examples.

Many thanks in advance for your enlightening comments.

I think it's going to be hard to convince anyone they are different companies when they all have the same phone numbers

And sites are not necessarily reviewed in the order they are submitted.

Take a look at these examples

Top: Health: Fitness: Personal Trainers: Directories (20)
Health Club Etc - owned by thefitmap.com
Health Finder - owned by thefitmap.com
Personal trainers in London - An actual page in thefitmap.com
UK personal trainer search - thefitmap.com again?
Exercise Register - thefitmap.com again?
Exercise Professionals thefitmap.com again?

Top: Health: Fitness: Directories (17)
The Fit Map - thefitmap.com

Some of these are even sub domains of the same site healthfinder.thefitmap.co.uk
Or even pages within a site.

I know this is the same company, taken from their 'learn more' page

Sister web sites
THEFITMAP Limited has developed several new web projects to aid and support exercise professionals and UK consumers:

Exercise Register
Exercise Professionals
Fitness Register
Health Clubs etc
Health Clubs
THEFITMAP.biz

Does this fall into the ODP guidelines?

Thank you for the report. Everything you reported has been taken care of. Have a great day!

Some sites were included back when the quality threshold was somewhat lower than it is now. When such sites are spotted, and are clearly far below listable quality now, then they are removed.

Other sites have changed content since being listed, and when spotted these are removed too. If the change is deemed malicious on the part of the webmaster, any and all related sites might be culled too.

There is a specific thread on this board for reporting such sites. Quality control of existing listings is of high importance, and with 450 000 categories to look after, we can always use outside help to spot irregularities in a rarely looked at corner of the listings.

Good job Snakey. Took a while for someone to finally get the main point of your post, but as they say, better late than never.

After all the fuss that I created over this issue I'd just like to end it with a little statement.

After seeing how well these sites were doing in all the search engines and being a complete novice I thought 'if you can't beat them, join them' So I tried to follow their example by having more than one domain. Not fully understanding what I was doing, essentially spam!

Even though I had good and unique content on all of my sites, I did not realise that by having more than one site it would negate my entry into such directories as this.

Do I feel guilty grassing someone up? Yes I do, even though what they were doing was affecting my income greatly. But there are many out there doing the same. With such a large directory and relatively few editors spread across it, it would be fair to say there will be a few errors etc, after all we are only human!

One thing I did notice when I first started submitting to the categories above there was an editor with the same name as one of my competitors - who as it happens has multiple sites listed (report has been filed) - but he isn't there anymore. Maybe it was co-incedence?

The real bug bear is the fact that the one site of mine that is listed in ODP is not the one I would have chosen, I would have chosen www.thehealthzone.co.uk or www.personal-trainers-nottingham.co.uk simply because of the great content, ease of use and overall my visitors rave about the sites.

So the moral of this story - Don't tread in others footsteps, who knows what they may have trodden in before you!

Many thanks for all you hard work ODP peoples!

Dave Carr

I just read this article about what search engines like to list, and what they don't like to list, and realised that many of the things mentioned there, are the same, or similar to, some of the goals of the ODP. Certainly a useful article to read, and there are several external forums already discussing the subject.

A year later and the owners of the above websites are still trying to spam ODP, here are a list of them. It would be nice if an editor could take this to hand and remove the multiple site these owners have.

Quickly looking at the footer links on www.thefitmap.com will verify this.


Top: Health: Fitness: Gyms: Europe: United Kingdom (117)
Gymuser.co.uk (www.gymuser.co.uk)

Top: Regional: Europe: United Kingdom: Health: Fitness (196)
The national register of personal trainers (www.nrpt.co.uk)

Top: Health: Fitness: Personal Training: Directories (7)
National register of personal trainers (www.nrpt.co.uk)

Top: Regional: Europe: United Kingdom: Guides and Directories: Directories (58)
Lifestyle UK (www.lifestyle.co.uk)

Top: Computers: Internet: On the Web: Web Applications: Content Management (153)
Thefitmap.biz (www.thefitmap.biz)

Top: Health: Fitness: Directories (14)
The fitmap (www.thefitmap.com)

I know that these are all owned by the same company, because they are trying to buy my site also.

I know that these are all owned by the same company, because they are trying to buy my site also.

Click to expand...

Maybe you should check your facts before you go sounding off and providing incorrect information as in your last post there are some major errors as I too have done some research.

Health Club Etc - nothing
Exercise Register - the Register of Exercise Professionals - a UK body to promote best practice in Personal Training in the UK
NRPT - the only UK website to offer a managed database of qualified and insured personal trainers for the public to find.
Lifestyle.co.uk - owned by Lifestyle.co.uk Limited - is there a connection here apart from a link?

Quickly looking at the footer links on www.thefitmap.com will verify this.

Click to expand...

Okay by this maybe we should assume every footer on every site has links to sites that are owned by that site - get real.

was affecting my income greatly

Click to expand...

Good one - the only thing that seems to be affecting any income would be the lack of site content on the sites you have mentioned (thehealthzone is just a directory and has only a few pages where there's a lot of listings from what I can see)

Finally - as for buying your site if they want to buy it then why don't you sell - then you don't have to worry about the situation any more.

Obviously where there is direct duplication of similar sites then the ODP does need to clean up - but that all sounded a wee bit like your toys came out the pram.

LaLaPo said:

but that all sounded a wee bit like your toys came out the pram.

Click to expand...

Any chance we could get that last bit translated into American? I checked with Google and they don't offer an English to American translation service.

gunner, you need the teletubbie to American translator service for that.

but heres a link that will help - http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=throw+the+toys+out+of+the+pram

LaLaPo - you do realise you were responding to a 15 month old post?

gimmster said:

gunner, you need the teletubbie to American translator service for that.

but heres a link that will help - http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=throw+the+toys+out+of+the+pram

LaLaPo - you do realise you were responding to a 15 month old post?

Click to expand...

LOL I like the urban dictionary.

Yes I did realise about the dates - it just hacks me off when ignorant people make sweeping statements about things they think they know a lot about. That's how war's start (sorry that is a little extreme maybe but hopefully you get my point )

Not wanting to get into a fight but...

LaLaPo, do you have a vested interest in this? Unless I missed something I don't see how you can dismiss this so simply?

I have nothing what so ever to do with this, but thought snakey seemed to have come around in support of the ODP and was making a real effort to report something.

I did my own checking and whatever research you did appears very flawed...

Here's what I found:

1) Some of the about pages look _very_ similar. As an academic, if my students did this I'd have them called in to explain. It has to be VERY "convenient" to warrent that sort of call in.

2) At http://www.gymuser.co.uk/contact/contact.htm the address given is
GymUser Ltd, 8 Unity Street, College Green, Bristol BS1 5HH

At http://www.nrpt.co.uk/contact/contact.htm the address given is:
National Register of Personal Trainers, PO Box 3455, Marlow
Buckinghamshire, SL7 1WG

Looks different. However according to Companies House UK, the registered company address of Company number: 5130060 (the owners of domain name nrpt.co.uk according to nominet) is:
SULLY PARTNERSHIP, 8 UNITY STREET, COLLEGE GREEN BRISTOL, BS1 5HH
Exactly the same as for GymUser Ltd

According to companies house the following companies are also registered to that address:
RESEARCH INTELLIGENCE LIMITED
C L K CLEANING LIMITED
Insurewith Limited
GLOBAL CONSULTING & EDUCATION LIMITED

The phone number for GymUser (08702006010) matches that of the NRPT as well as
* Southwark night clubs
* STUNG Internet Services

Now, none of this means more than saying it is the same site owner. Whether it is infact 2 sites over 2 domains but owned by the name person, or 1 site over 2 domains owned by the same person... that's another question. But it definitly needs another look.