messed up on description

Hi there
The site I am working on is Harwood House www.harwoodhouse.com, listed at http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/Canada/Nova_Scotia/Localities/W/Wolfville/Travel_and_Tourism/

I just did a site update request, but I think I messed up on my description.

I think I exceeded the maximum number of words
I submitted 35

I wanted to change it
from:
Room information, history, area attractions, and rates.
to:
Comfort, relaxation and warm hospitality await you. Bed and Breakfast is conveniently located adjacent to Acadia University in Wolfville NS, within walking distance to superb dining and specialty shops. Open year round - Swiss and French spoken

Did I mess up completley?
Can I resubmit to your standards (perhaps omitting the end statement "Swiss and French spoken")

How can I fix my error?

thank you folks

Hi WeeZee,

A little bad news for you. The description you would like to suggest is not written to ODP Guidelines (and I'm not talking about the number of words )

Added: Just to mention, when constructing a description, keep in mind, it shouldn't read like an ad.

I wouldn't worry about it, if I were you. Most likely an editor will end up deleting your update request. (i.e. No Harm, No Foul)

First, there is no hard-and-fast maximum number of words to a description. An editor will write a description to, in as compact a way as possible, describe the site.

The description that you have submitted will most certainly not get accepted. The first sentance is pure marketing, and does nothing to describe the site or its purpose, so erase that. The exact location is not relevant either, nor are the superb stores that are close by - the category it is listed in is Wolfville, so that doesn't need to be in there either. Not only that but your proposed description does not describe what can be found on the site at all - all it does is describe your business.

An ODP description needs to do both.

I have not looked at the site, but, based purely on what has been written here, I might just update the description to "Bed and breakfast. Includes room information, history, area attractions, and rates."

I appreciate that this is possibly the equivalent to changing the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy listing for Earth from "harmless" to "mostly harmless" after years and years of study, and I'm sure this isn't giving you the keywords that it seems you might be looking for, but that would be how I would write that description to comform to ODP guidelines. (Assuming that this is what can be found on the site, of course)

Hope this helps.

[edit to add: Now I have looked at the listing, I wouldn't change it, since the text "Bed and Breakfast" appear in the title and would not be duplicated in the description.]

PS What language, exactly, is "Swiss"? That's a new one on me.

- edited this post because Alucard was faster and said what I said better -

thank you so much!

Could I submit this?:

Hosted year round. Three large guest bedrooms, all feature private bathrooms. Gourmet breakfasts. Includes room information, history, area attractions, and rates. No smoking please.

I would like to update the description so that it will Google correclty- and use the (meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="NOSNIPPET") in the tags

If I can submit that description, how I can I do it now that Ihave entered the messed up one

thanks again

The previous update request has been removed.

One thing you have to understand is that the ODP, and therefore ODP editors, have a care level that asymptotically approaches zero when it comes to how a listing "Googles".

All we ask ourselves is: "Does the existing description adequately describe the business and what can be found on the web site?"

You are more than welcome to submit another update request - we can't stop you doing that. A local editor will review it and make a decision.

Thanks.

I had to go to dictionary.com to look up "asymptotically" & I shamefully report that I still don't know what that means

thank you for your response.

What started my quest was the google description and then reading somewhere that if you use that meta tag, google will display the DMOZ description ... then over to DMOZ to see what it was.

this is kind of new to me and I don't want to tick anyone off ... just have the site display and described as best as can be.

I will resubmit.

thank you so much.

(feel free to finger-wag and tell me off if I am out of line - I want to learn and sometimes even the concise rules confuse me)

He means ODP editors don't care how a listing "Googles". We don't cater to search engines.

You're not ticking anyone off, that I know of (they haven't started an "isn't WeeZee a dork?" thread on any internal forum yet, for example) and I quite understand that it's difficult to get your way through all the stuff there is to read. That's why we tend to be fairly terse here...

Usually an update request is a trigger for an editor to re-review the site. More often than not, the editor will use the requested update as a guideline on what to look for - either they missed something when it was reviewed before, or the site contents have changed. It is very, very rare for the supplied description to be just accepted, so please don't look for specific keywords to be put in there.

So if I were you I wouldn't sweat it - the update request that you have supplied this time might well trigger another review and it may cause the description to get updated.

Hope this helps.
(I still want to know what language "Swiss" is - do you mean a swiss dialect of French or German? I am very curious)

LOL - thanks for the kind guidance.
I would much rather have "terse" than mickey-mouse babysitting. I am learning as fast as I can with help from folks like you (thanks)

what is "Swiss" - beats the heck out of me! But I will ask them this afternoon when I go for a visit. I will let you know

I will be back soon

Again - HUGE thanks for your help
It is a relief to find straight-shooting assitance.

WeeZee

In Switzerland several different dialects of German are spoken, that might be what we are talking about here. I believe most are close to standard German, but I believe [but do not guarantee] at least one is very different.

Schweizerdeutsch as opposed to standard German - Hochdeutsch

..and my understanding is dialects of French and Italian, too. I have never heard anyone refer to "Swiss" as a language before, hence my question.

Good morning kind people

Well, I asked the gent and he said he wanted it displayed as "Swiss" because of the multi-lingual population there and he speaks them all. He figured it was easier to mention it that way than to list out his lingoes. He had a chuckle and asked "who are these brilliant people you communicate with - lol - no one has mentioned that to me in all of the years I have done this"

So that's the explanation .. off to peruse your site some more ... and learn


WeeZee

No way we're going to write 'Swiss spoken' in a description... Swiss_is_not_a_language and that's final.
'All official Swiss languages spoken' might be considered though, but I'm not promising anything here...

Yes, I understand and appreciate that tuisp.

I have resubmitted update request (yesterday) as ...

Hosted year round. Three large guest bedrooms, all feature private bathrooms. Gourmet breakfasts. Includes room information, history, area attractions, and rates. No smoking please.

I was just checking on the language cuz Alucard was curious , didn't intend to request the info be on the description (after I had been first corrected).

(I love the way y'all are "on it" in this forum!)

cheers
WeeZee

and my understanding is dialects of French and Italian, too

Click to expand...

As a Swiss citizen, living in Geneva, Switzerland, I speak French. We have 4 official languages: German, French, Italian and
Romansh . In the German part, people are speaking German dialects, (one for each canton) but not in the French part.

I remember being very confused by numbers in Basel many years ago. I probably have the spelling incorrect, but if I remember rightly, they go ein, zwo, dree instead of ein, zwei, drei.

Also, danke is pronounced merci

As a Swiss citizen, living in Geneva, Switzerland, I speak French. We have 4 official languages: German, French, Italian and

Click to expand...

Yet one of the things I loved as an American (who speaks English, Thai and Tagalog) was that I never had the least difficulty travelling or communicating when I was there. Lovely county, lovely people. Great trains! I want to go back!

By good luck, today I talked to someone I know who came from Switzerland, and Swiss/French made sense to him, and my interpretation was correct. Swiss means to him [Swiss/German] since French in Switzerland is very similar to regular French, whereas German is spoken very differently and sounds more like Dutch, however it's linguisticaly German.

However, I agree that we could not have Swiss in the description. But I see that's not an issue.

WeeZee said:

Well, I asked the gent and he said he wanted it displayed as "Swiss" because of the multi-lingual population there and he speaks them all.

Click to expand...

Speaking as a websurfer - without wearing my editor's hat, and trying not to think like a professional linguist - I think he's probably shooting himself in the foot, if anything. Today he has "French/Swiss" - I interpreted it as "French/Schwytzertuetsch" (Swiss German), but if in reality he means "French/German/Italian/Romansh" I'd definitely put that instead. It looks much better to anybody who knows anything about Switzerland, than having a nonexistant language there - and to Italian-speakers in particular it's a much clearer signal about what he means.

(Also, Schwytzertuetsch is not really mutually intelligible with Standard German - I'm pretty sure most of the German-speaking population of Switzerland are bilingual Schwytzertuetsch/German - so if speakers of Standard German interpret "Swiss" as "Swiss German" it's not necessarily a recommendation )