Multiple domain listings - Cutting your useful content in small pieces

Hi,

I am a travel profesional in Greece, having a small but broad - in terms of topics covered - travel guide for a region that is online and listed appropriately on ODP for the last 2-3 years.

I post here in order to share your opinion about the latest phenomenon of travel professionals/companies that develop and submit to ODP different domains for specific travel related topics.

Generally I think there are 3 alternatives:

1. Develop a general travel guide website about a broad region or even country that will include information and services about rent a car, hotels, vacations, food, shopping etc. that cover all the localities of that region or country.

2. Develop a general travel website AND smaller websites for each locality that will include the above information and services.

3. Develop a general travel website AND smaller websites for each locality AND smaller websites for each topic not directly related to travel i.e. food.

Unfortunately I have realized that No1 is proven to be the worst case for a website, while No2 and mainly No3 are thriving, gaining multiple listings on ODP.

Let me give you a short example:

- Let's say that the company A is developing a general travel guide for US.
- Then company A develops another travel guide for California.
- Then company A develops another travel guide for Los Angeles.
- Then company A develops another guide for the hotels of Los Angeles.
- Then company A develops another guide for the food in Los Angeles.
- Then company A develops another guide for the history of Los Angeles.
- and so on (for each state, each city etc.)

Let's say also that company A is very careful and each website has its own unique content; no mirrors, no duplicate content.

On the other hand I have read that ODP guidelines state that only ONE website of an indivindual or company can be listed for each topic (what is considered a topic really?); please correct me if I am wrong.

The alternative:

Let's say that another company B collects ALL the above information under the same domain/website.

The question:

How does ODP treat company A and company B listings?

I am sorry for asking but I was very surprised to see that most of the travel websites in Greece that I am aware of, are trying to "cheat" ODP that way.

The problem is that if this is accepted, all people with useful and unique content should start cutting it in small pieces and post them on different domains for an extra few bucks per year.

Thank you for sharing your comments.

Dimitris

what you are describing is what we call directory abuse (among other names) and it is an excellent way to get none of the sites listed.

As you have done a couple of times already, please report anything you find in the abuse thread - we will do our utmost to make sure that these sorts of things are rectified.

Sometimes it takes many sets of eyes to make a good directory, and to have someone who knows the business looking at it and helping us find these sorts of companies makes for a much better and fairer directory.

So thank you very much for your help so far!

Can you please give me some more details on the question and the theoritical case I described? It will help me understand more in depth the ODP guidelines and how you generally deal with such situations. Thank you for your help

what you are describing is what we call directory abuse (among other names) and it is an excellent way to get none of the sites listed.

Click to expand...

Just to let you know that I reported 2 examples related to my post here at http://resource-zone.com/forum/showthread.php?p=192167.

The first one is what I call a soft typical example of developing multiple travel sites and the second one might be the definition of ODP Abuse...

Category not updated from Saturday, April 3, 2004

HI!
Category is not updated from april 2004, so almost one year, i have read, that this is normal, but what if editor of this category is not editing anymore, how can u check that?


Thx for answer.

Edo


P.S

Category is http://dmoz.org/World/Slovensko/

>what if editor of this category is not editing anymore, how can u check that?

You can't. All you know is, last time that category was edited, that editor had privileges to edit that specific category.

You don't know how active he was then, or how active he's been since, or whether all his activity has been somewhere else in the meantime.

A very important point.
The last update date is only for that category. Any actions done in categories below it won't change this date. As you are asking about World/Slovenska the date will only change if a new category directly beneath it will be created as there are and I suspect won't be any sites listed directly in World/Slovenska.
Conclusion the date for this category doesn't tell you anything about what is happening in the Slovenska categories.