Multiple category listings

Hi all

I have a site that is appropriate for probably 100 or more dmoz categories as well as the parent category of those categories. I was told that the parent category was "too broad" though. What can be done about this? All information is unique to my site, and all information has been personally collected by myself over the past 15 or so years.

Thanks

Posting the URL of your site would help us. Generally you should only submit to the one single-most relevant category.

Well I want this discussion to be as abstract as possible at the moment - suffice to say the site is not a conglomeration of links to other sites, repackaged content from elsewhere (well not from elswhere online exclusively - it obviously has sources both online and offline), galleries of pictures or automatically harvested content. The site offers functionality as well as content - ie you can apply filters to the data, combine the filters, compare sets of data, etc. The site itself is approximately 11000 "pages" in about 500 divisions. Again, I stress that the editor (or perhaps it was even an auto-generated message when trying to submit - many, many months ago) responded with a message saying the parent category was too broad for my site. I feel that the content is more appropriate in the sub-categories though, but I do feel that each should be given equal weight.

zak, the problem is that there is no general rule which can be followed - each site needs to be evaluated on its own merits.

If it truly is a unique, rich resource, then editors will make the decision to list parts of it in various categories, but this is very VERY rarely done by a submitter adding a site multiple times to different categories.

If you feel that your site should be an exception to the ODP guideline of "listing once" then you are going to need to allow editors to take a look at it.

appropriate for probably 100 or more dmoz categories as well as the parent category of those categories. I was told that the parent category was "too broad" though.

Click to expand...

It either belongs in the Parent, or the "One Best" subcat. I'm not aware of an ODP category that has 100 direct subcats. Usually these are grouped into subtopics (Topic/Sub-Topic/Product/Sub-Type). Although you may have products across several sub-topics, usually one sub-topic appears to have the strongest focus. For example, if most of the site is focused on Women's footwear, but it happens to also sell some Children's footwear too, we would list it under Women's footwear. For cases where there really is a little bit of everything being sold, we have categories like http://dmoz.org/Shopping/General_Merchandise/ .

HTH

I am wondering why an editor ever told you that it was too broad, rather than simply re-classifying it and moving into the appropriate queue elsewhere for you.

Most editors don't get into direct discussion with submitters.

Zak - I wonder if perhaps you wanted to submit the site to a high-level category where the submit function has been switched off. There is no 'suggest URL' link in such categories. So perhaps you contacted the editor?

As I said I forgot whether it was an editor or some automated response that informed me that it was too broad a category to list in.

Did you maybe apply to be an editor for that category at one point in time? We do have a standardized feedback letter for when we deny a new editor application where we feel the category is "too broad" for a new editor. Did you maybe apply to edit the category and just happened to use your own web site as one of the examples. That would explain the "too broad" response. And it would have nothing to do with the URLs that you used as examples. Just from what you're saying here it sounds like that might be the case.