One commercial site has 105 listings

Hello. Much of the content of a site is recipes gathered from other sources and compiled together with pictures, not much is unique at all. The site is listed 105 times in many categories, sometimes like 5 times in the same category. I suppose this website is owned by a DMOZ editor. The problem I have is that now this site is commercial, selling all kinds of products, with top rank due to so many DMOZ placements. It seems crazy for one commercial site to have 105 listings so I reported it using the abuse reporting tool, within 24 hours that case was closed, as I assume it was looked at.

It's been about 10 days and the site is still listed 105 times. Is it possible that the site was trimmed down to a reasonable number of listings but there is not instant refresh due to DMOZ periodic update?

Is it ok for a commercial site to have 105 listings?

Thanks!

Recipe categories have different guidelines about deeplinks and number of links. Many sites in that area have a lot of listed pages.

Thanks for your note. The site is [removed] and they are advertising in various magazines and selling quite a number of items online. It seems to me that the site should not be listed so many times, it's abuse of the directory because the examples go beyond just recipes.

For a particular example at link below they have a two listings for products they sell, this is not a commercial category but they are listed there twice with their products,

[category and urls removed-please do not use specifics]

There are several such examples.

48k links to one website

TheRanch said:

Hello. Much of the content of a site is recipes gathered from other sources and compiled together with pictures, not much is unique at all. The site is listed 105 times in many categories, sometimes like 5 times in the same category. I suppose this website is owned by a DMOZ editor. The problem I have is that now this site is commercial, selling all kinds of products, with top rank due to so many DMOZ placements. It seems crazy for one commercial site to have 105 listings so I reported it using the abuse reporting tool, within 24 hours that case was closed, as I assume it was looked at.

It's been about 10 days and the site is still listed 105 times. Is it possible that the site was trimmed down to a reasonable number of listings but there is not instant refresh due to DMOZ periodic update?

Is it ok for a commercial site to have 105 listings?

Thanks!

Click to expand...

It is nothing comparing to the following subtree: http://dmoz.org/World/Polska/Leksykon/Encyklopedia/encyklopedia.pl/
Aparently single website is listed there 48353 times. and on every linked page about 80% of screen is taken by ads and about 10% is usefull information (encyclopedia article). Aparently someone makes money abusing dmoz project.

Aparently someone makes money abusing dmoz project.

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Not really, this is more a survivor of early DMOZ days. We're working on it.

An excellent question, it seems it was already in the process of being disbanded, but due to the amount of data, it might take some time to complete.

But, if you look at http://dmoz.org/World/Polska/Leksykon/ - you will see that category no longer is accessable from there.

Lots of people attempt to abuse the ODP. Most of them aren't editors, of course, and most of them fail (and then complain bitterly about the more successful of their ilk.)

In the early days of the ODP, staff looked for sites with broad coverage, to seed ODP categories with massive topical (not retail) deeplinks. Some of those partnerships have been terminated; some still remain; some have been pruned back but are still heavily deeplinked.

There is no comparision between what is available on the net now, and what was available five years ago. Many sites that were MOST exceptional and worthy of deeplinks then, would hardly merit a single listing now. (And the sometimes-feeble imitations of those sites, being done now merely to get pagerank by multiple ODP listings, deserve merely universal contempt!) And as for the poorer sites, we are slowly pruning down (or slowly coming to a consensus not to deeplink) them.

A more realistic way to think (compared to the knee-jerk instant accusations of mass abuse) is to consider that there are actually three criteria of content. In ascending order, they are:

1) enough content not to inspire editors to go on an immediate extermination jihad;
2) enough content to stay listed
3) enough content to GET listed.

All of these bars rise over time.

Your unlisted site has to meet the high standard of current #3; you may have seen editors agree that the sites you reference don't meet that standard: nor do they have to. All they have to meet is #2. And if they meet #1, editors will be asking themselves whether the ODP would be benefitted more by their work adding new sites, or re-reviewing current sites.

What we are saying is that these sites you mention met level #3 at one time, and may meet level #1 today: and so we wouldn't feel a need to drop all other constructive work to remove them immediately.

Content!?

Get ready for the top ten domains on DMOZ.
Rank Listings Domain
1 230,016 CNN.COM
2 98,188 GEOCITIES.COM
3 34,428 TRIPOD.COM
4 29,618 ANGELFIRE.COM
5 19,982 AOL.COM
6 19,668 TOPIX.NET
7 17,510 FREE.FR
8 15,998 YAHOO.COM
9 13,493 NEWADVENT.ORG
10 9,749 IMDB.COM

Just browsing through some of them on CNN I found movie reviews from 1998 and other useful stuff.
The free servers were even better. I had no idea how many harry potter and lord of the rings fansites there were. Luckily Firefox has an excellent popup blocker otherwise I wouldn't have had time to post this, I'd still be trying to close all those open browser windows.

hutcheson said:

1) enough content not to inspire editors to go on an immediate extermination jihad;
2) enough content to stay listed
3) enough content to GET listed.

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Hutch, how about dumping the current outdated and corrupt directory and building anew from scratch.
There are so many categories that I can name that have purely promotional and keyword laden descriptions I can hardly believe you people even take yourselves seriously anymore.
So enough with the condescending remarks in this forum why don't you do something about it??
Or is it too much fun to torment webmasters in this useless forum?
Have fun Flaming!
Dan

I hope Hitch doesn't take the bait and leaves you smoldering in the dirt.

old_crone said:

I hope Hitch doesn't take the bait and leaves you smoldering in the dirt.

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Good luck I say!
It's already been established the "ODP" is corrupt, outdated and invalid. All he has left is this stupid forum. rolleyeys: back at you
Dan

Well, six of those domains are in effect site aggregations, not individual sites. The ODP doesn't discriminate against websites because of their choice of hosts. And the number of listings for each of those domains, merely reflects the number of people who have used that company as host.

Then there are three sites that were originally systematically deeplinked. None of them compete with individual webmasters or businesses: so there's no possible reason for webmasters to worry about how those deeplinks affect competition.

The tenth site remains easily unique, and tends to be the first or second site in every category where it's listed. Again, it doesn't compete with anybody, although plagiarizers sometimes pretend to compete with it.

All of the last four sites are periodically discussed in internal forums. I'd expect two of them, over time, to drift downward in number of listings; the other two, I can't predict yet. It is fair to say that neither of them HAS any competition, only plagiarized counterfeits. And it is also fair to say that someday that could change.

One point of confusion worth addressing: when we deeplink an informational site, the question of whether that site has too-few, too-many, or just-the-right-number-of listings simply doesn't arise. The actual question is much more nuanced. It has more to do with the interplay between depth of focus, and breadth of content. Again, that's a recurrent discussion in the internal forums.

There are probably tens of thousands of inappropriate listings in the ODP at any particular time. You're welcome to see if you can find one. (I trust it's obvious to everyone that the approach you've taken is an absolute non-starter.) But if you try other methods, and find one that works, there's a thread to report inappropriate listings in. If you develop a reputation for being able to efficiently find lots of bad listings, your street cred will rise, and people will be more likely to think you have some advice worth considering.

It's already been established the "ODP" is corrupt, outdated and invalid. All he has left is this stupid forum. rolleyeys: back at you

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I'm not sure why you're so bitter about the ODP. Your first post here at this forum that you hate (but keep coming back to) was not bitter and you've been treated respectfully since then. So I'm not sure where this is all coming from.

The ODP as a whole has only been established as "corrupt, outdated, and invalid" by people with an axe to grind. That's not to say that there hasn't been corruption but we deal with that very seriously when we find it. And, yes, there are outdated categories but those don't invalidate the entire directory. If there are outdated categories that interest you and you aren't stepping up to the plate to help out, though, you really have no right to complain.