Removal of MLM IR Sites

Spammers are much more clever than that.

What, exactly, would they do? You said that allowing personal web pages which mention MLMs would be a loophole (or something similar), and I said responded that it's a "loophole" that's easy for editors to deal with; I don't see what else they could do with the allowence for personal pages which allow for mention of MLM. Of course, MLM site owners could submit their ordinary MLM sites all over the Business/ and Shopping/ trees of ODP, but we have ways of dealing with that

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Although an organized list of sites is most useful for surfers, many sites desire a listing mainly for the positive effect it has on search engines rankings (like you never heard that before <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" /> ). Not being able to get a listing in an appropriate category for their main page may inspire some to develop personal, or thinly veiled "informational" sites, for the sole purpose of getting links to their domains (am I too cynical?). Of course they may do that anyway, but I would think that having an appropriate category would reduce this, or at least make enforcement of this practice easier (this is just my opinion and you are welcome to disagree with me).

And what about sites that sell a MLM product together with a non-MLM product? What is the "thrust" of the site in that case, the ratio of MLM to non-MLM products? The "no MLM distributors" rule is not as clear as you make it out to be.

"unique pricing structures, discounts, and so on" is just a way of saying "unique content", which is required of all sites. The vast majority of MLM IR sites have no unique content, so we just give up on the whole area

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I guess then I'm an anomaly, an MLM site with unique content. Such across-the-board policies will always remove useful information, and I hope you will reconsider this policy in the future.

Dave

Although an organized list of sites is most useful for surfers, many sites desire a listing mainly for the positive effect it has on search engines rankings... Not being able to get a listing in an appropriate category for their main page may inspire some to develop personal, or thinly veiled "informational" sites, for the sole purpose of getting links to their domains

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If we cared about that, we'd have to ban any links from sites outside of the Shopping/ and Business/ trees to sites inside those trees (a way too draconian rule), as people who already have a lisitng there could also want to increase their search engine rank, and are probably already doing so; and since there's already a lot of rank obsessed web-masters out there who are likely doing this, prompting MLM site owners to do this by removing their primary listing isn't going to make that much of a difference.

However, we do *not* care about search engine placement. We officially don't care. We make a directory, and other people can use it, so long as they follow the Open Directory License. That's all we (officially) care about: making a good directory, and making sure downstream users follow the license. While it may irk us editors that people play games with the directory to tweak PageRank and such, it's against policy to remove such sites, and besides, we have better things to do with our editing time than to figure out if a site's purpose is to influence search engine ranking. We'll only start officially caring about search engine rankings if laws are passed about such rankings, something I feverently hope never happens.

I guess then I'm an anomaly, an MLM site with unique content. Such across-the-board policies will always remove useful information, and I hope you will reconsider this policy in the future.

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The usefuleness of ODP to end-users that is lost by not listing sites such as yours is more than made up for by the editor time freed up by not having to deal with the 99.9% of MLM sites that aren't like yours, time which can be spent editing in other categories. This tradeoff isn't good for your site, but ODP editors are concerned with making the ODP a good resource for end-users, not a good resource for web-masters.