Odd and Odder

Hello everyone. I need a little advice.

We are a small company that has a website that was in the DMOZ. We hired a company to do some redesign and allow us to list our inventory on the website through our internal database. Not long after this our URL was removed from the DMOZ. I am not sure why this happened. From the reaction of the company we hired, I suspect it was because of some bad product specifications were in the Database....or that it was wrong product description. We fired the company and decided to simply just learn this stuff.

We suffered greatly from this removal, and even had to lay off employees. We did adapt though and adopted the strategy of marketing as if the DMOZ did not exist, and we are now doing quite well....and we are hiring again. We have also learned quite allot about SEO...the hard way.

So now something strange has happened. When we started this company several years ago, we purchased several URLs. We did this just to make sure our corporate identity would be clean on the internet. We purchased several that were close to our full company name. We chose to use the one that was the shortest with an abbreviated word. We parked the one that was exactly our company name, and put a redirect pointing to our website.

Two days ago, I was looking at our traffic and I saw traffic referred from the DMOZ. I checked and saw that our re-direct URL was added to the DMOZ.

The Timing was odd. I was just about to try to re-submit our original URL. We have a full time programmer working for us, and he suggest we just request to edit the redirect url to our actual website. The name of the company is the same. The content is identical. All the problems with the origional design were fixed a long time ago.

This being said, the inner maturations of the DMOZ is an enigma to us and we do not want a potential benefit to the company turn into a negative. If we request the URL to be edited to the original, will they take out the newly added one? It is obvious that an editor chose to add our site. Is it ok to ask that the URL be changed to the one that was removed? Thanks in advance for any advice you can provide.

OK, let's begin at the beginning.

From the reaction of the company we hired, I suspect it was because of some bad product specifications were in the Database....or that it was wrong product description.

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Highly unlikely. The absence of a database, or having very little information, maybe, but we generally don't judge the accuracy unless it is so bas as to make us believe the website is a fraud.

We suffered greatly from this removal, and even had to lay off employees.

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Now really, you are giving us much more credit than we deserve. An ODP lising does not make or break a well-run company. We are but one place where someone can find data or information on your company. We simply do not have that much power.

We have a full time programmer working for us, and he suggest we just request to edit the redirect url to our actual website.

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That is a good plan, go to the category where the site is listed and suggest an update. If everything is as you say, it should be a straightforward change.

If we request the URL to be edited to the original, will they take out the newly added one?

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that sometimes happens if the site needs to be moved to a category where the reviewing editor does not have permission to edit, but if it is simply a URL change, you should have no cause to worry. Remember though, we list the URl that actually has the content, not a vanity URL that send the surfer to where the content can be found.


Go for it.

Hope this helps.

If the URL that we have listed redirects to elsewhere, by all means use the update listing link at the top of the category page. If the editor agrees, s/he'll make the change.