Listing removed?

I have noticed that many of my sites have been removed from the directory? They were originally listed under:
Reference: Education: International: International Student Exchange

The site were:
www.InternationalStudent.com
www.InternationalStudentLoan.com
and others along the international student theme?

Can anyone help me out?
Thanks
RM

I think you answered your own question. You've basically got several sites all selling effectively the same thing, which we regard as spam. As such, the listings have been removed. Sorry.

Perhaps you should read http://dmoz.org/guidelines/include.html#affiliate which covers our policy on such sites.

I am still unsure as to why these have been removed? The sites are not mirrors? They are not re-directs? They are not made up of pure affiliate links? They satisfy the criteria listed on the page you gave me!

Each of our sites are unique in content and what we offer:
InternationalStudent.com - General International Student Portal
InternationalStudentInsurance.com - Targetted insurance to students
InternationalStudentLoan.com - Offers loan products to international students
InternationalScholarships.com - a free online database of scholarships designed for international students.

I would just like to get your feedback on this - originally we were listed and now not? Is it because of the url's all including the word International Student? Do we have to change something? Can we be re-considered for inclusion?
I would appreciate your feedback and comments

Thanks
RM <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

Look, this is really simple. A whole slue of domain names set up ON the same subject BY the same organization, is NOT multiple sites. It's ONE site.

If the pages link to pages on other domains, it's CLEARLY one site. If they don't link to each other, then it is merely one site with brain-damaged navigation.

There are two possibilities:

(1) The pages on the various domains link to each other, so the ODP can link to one of them, and have all the content represented. We're happy, users are happy, and the sane companies are happy, since they can link to any new pages from their own home page.

(2) Or they don't link to each other, and the only reasonable conclusion is "if the company's OWN WEBMASTER doesn't think his OWN pages ON THE SAME TOPIC are worth linking to, then why on earth would anyone else?"

Either way, the listings shouldn't come back. Resubmittals of them (or additional similarly "related sites") could result in -- well, no need to go into that, you can read the submittal policies. "Related" of course could mean "from the same organization."

If the organization has an ODP link to a home page for information on this topic, it may use that home page to link to any other content it thinks relevant, including pages hosted on any domains it owns. But don't ask the ODP to compensate for ill-considered and counterproductive internal website navigation or promotional schemes.

Hutcheson and Totalxsive thank you for your comments and feedback! I can see now how you are looking at it: because we are one company and have multiple domains on the international student theme you are looking at this as all one site and thus we were removed because it was seen as spamming.

Now - how do we go about restoring www.internationalstudent.com?

Also - quick question? If we were a different company for each site (hypothetically of course) all the sites would be included? Correct?

The last thing we want to do is spam - we see each site as offering a different and unique service!

Once again thank you for your help and feedback!
RM

&gt;how do we go about restoring www.internationalstudent.com?

There is nothing you can do to add, remove, or modify a listing. You can ask that a site be reviewed -- the editing community has agreed to do that. Whether it's listed depends on the content. In this case, multiple metas have now looked at the site, and I am confident the removal will stand.

The original listing was, in my judgment, an accident. My theory is that the reviewing editor was misled by the site layout to think there was more content than there actually was.

&gt;If we were a different company for each site (hypothetically of course) all the sites would be included? Correct?
Absolutely certainly unequivocably not. I was not thinking about that specific question: I can see now that if read from that standpoint, it would have been inadvertantly misleading.

Thanks for the clarification!

So, we can add our sites again for consideration - that is not a problem? Correct? I feel that InternationalStudent.com is good enough for inclusion (at least). I would like to hear your comments and suggestion if you think otherwise?

I have another question (well point I guess)?

A whole slue of domain names set up ON the same subject BY the same organization, is NOT multiple sites. It's ONE site.

Click to expand...

I was looking and saw that GoAbroad.com has the following listed:
GoAbroad.com - http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Education/International/Study_Abroad/Program_Directories/
USuniversities - http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Education/Colleges_and_Universities/Directories/
LanguageSchoolGuides.com - http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Education/International/Language_Schools/

I guess what I am trying to figure out is that there are companies out there in the directory that have several sites on the same subject - GoAbroad.com is just one example I found and I assume there are more. So why are they not removed? If I understand what you are saying is that our sites were removed because everything should be under the InternationalStudent.com site and not broken out into the various sites?

Thanks
RM

So, we can add our sites again for consideration - that is not a problem? Correct?

Click to expand...

I think you should interpret hutcheson's previous response to you as an indication that you should not resubmit any of the sites.

If you have any examples of other sites doing this, then please let someone with 'Meta', 'Editall' or 'Editall/Catmv' (preferably Meta) know via private feedback and we'll look into it.

(I'm a little busy with Real Life at the moment so I personally would not have the time to sort things out)

You forgot to mention http://edvisorsnetwork.com/