site removed from category

Our site, http://www.orsracksdirect.com/ is no longer in the category (or anywhere in DMOZ):

http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Vehicles/Parts_and_Accessories/Exterior/Roof_Racks_and_Carriers/

and I'm not sure why, it seems like the most appropriate place for us. We were there for over a year and just noticed this week that it is gone. The description I think we used was : "Offers information and online sales of roof, trunk and hitch mounted car racks including bike, ski, snowboard, kayak and canoe carriers." - that's exactly what we do (no bait and switch here).

So I'm not sure how to figure out why we got removed or how to get back in. Any advice and/or help would be appreciated.

Because your other site/URL is already listed in

http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Recreation/Outdoors/
http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_Amer...Localities/M/Montpelier/Business_and_Economy/

ORS Racks Direct is a completely separate business from Onion River Sports - I see now from your link (http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Recreation/Outdoors/) that we were somehow given the URL for Onion River Sports (onionriver.com) but a ORS Racks Direct description.

Is there a way to fix this? If the editors think that http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Recreation/Outdoors/ is a more appropriate category for ORS Racks Direct than the Racks/Carriers Category - that is fine with us but we would like the correct URL for ORS Racks Direct to be used so people that click on it don't get confused.

Why do people do this to us?

Do I have a sign taped to my back: "I'm an ODP editor. Anything the marines won't believe, come tell me"?

They think we are stupid - they are wrong

For the ODP purposes the two companies are one and the same. One URL is a cadidate for listing.

We don't think anyone is stupid, we're not trying to trick anyone. We have always valued the ODP, especially for its relevance and to a certain extent rely on it for our business.

We were listed in http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Vehicles/Parts_and_Accessories/Exterior/Roof_Racks_and_Carriers/ with this description: "Offers information and online sales of roof, trunk and hitch mounted car racks including bike, ski, snowboard, kayak and canoe carriers." for over a YEAR and then we suddenly disappeared.

It doesn't do anyone any good to click on a link to ORS Racks Direct and then go to a site that doesn't sell racks on line(onionriver.com ) and doesn't even match the description of the listing.

If we are not a candidate for 2 separate listings, if for ODP purposes it is considered one and the same because the company is run out of the same location, we would at least like to make sure that the correct URL is associated with the listing (http://www.orsracksdirect, not http://www.onionriver.com).

An example of a company in the same situation as ours (totally separate, legitimate business out of same location): Vermont Teddy Bear ( my wife works there) they own PajamaGram & TastyGram companies - 3 different companies, they run them all out of the same location yet they have 3 listings (one for each "sister company" - http://www.vermontteddybear.com, http://www.pajamagram.com, http://www.tastygram.com).

So what do we need to do to be seen as 2 different businesses? Do we have to be a multi-million dollar company like Vermont Teddy Bear and if so how do we get there without a DMOZ listing?

So not trying to "get away" with anything,or trying to make anyone look stupid, just frustrated. Any further help with this situation would be greatly appreciated.

You link all the separate domains of your website together so that your ODP listing will effectively present your entire business line.

In the eyes of ODP these 2 sites belong to 1 company. And as the are both basicaly about the same sort of products only 1 will be listed. It is not our problem that a company decides to split i'ts activities over 2 or more sites.

But I agree with you that current listing isn't 100% correct. It has the url we should list (as it is clearly your main url) but has the title and description of your secondary site. My advice is to send an update request, using the currently listed url, and provide us with the correct title 'Onion River Sports' and a description that fits our guidelines.

The title has been corrected already. It's just not showing on the public side yet.

Thanks for the updates/explanations. Now that we understand how the ODP looks at things, and if ODP is only going to give us one URL, we would really appeal to you to use the ORS Racks Direct URL only. Should we submit a change request for that under the listing at:http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Recreation/Outdoors/? It seems like it would have made more sense to change the URL and not the title of that listing.

Onion River Sports is a small local shop in Montpelier, VT (already in the Montpelier, VT category, very appropriate, good job on that http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/Vermont/Localities/M/Montpelier/Business_and_Economy/).

It is much more important to us that ORS Racks Direct (http://www.orsracksdirect) get listed in DMOZ ( instead of onionriver.com) because we rely on people finding us online.

Bottom line, if we can have just one, we want ( beg?) for orsracksdirect.com to be the listing.

Yes, but there are other domains owned by your company too, according to our records. We will find the one URL which we feel best represents your company, which is *not* necessarily the one that represents the product line that you think is the most important. Editors have decided that the onionriver URL is the one we will list - I suggest strongly that, rather than pursuing other listings, you make your content available from there. If you wish that site to be listed most appropriately, it would be in your own best interests to represent the full range of your activites on there.

Thank you for the response Alucard.

In a perfect DMOZ that would be an appropriate answer I suppose. However, as a humanly edited endeavor, is it possible that is an unfair assessment of our situation? DMOZ has always been considerably open to situations where there is *unique content* at stake, and the directory is filled with deeply listed sites that attest to this. One obvious instance is epinions.com, which has hundreds of pages listed in different categories.

Our site www.orsracksdirect.com has substantially unique content. All you need to do is visit the site to immediately recognize the amount of effort and time that has been spent to build this company up as a unique entity in and of itself. It is employed and run by an entirely different crew of employees that specialize in dealing only with car racks every day of the year. The website contains a vast wealth of imformation that is now considered to be one of the number one destinations on the internet that answers just about all questions that consumers may have regarding car racks. The site includes highly engineered databases that consumers can interact with to find just the right system for their particular vehicle and needs. The site includes enormous amounts of information on hundreds and hundreds of products, including downloadable installation/product instructions for every item. These are aspects that are not readily available online.

Bearing this in mind, we feel that DMOZ is doing visitors/searchers an enormous disservice by not including www.orsracksdirect.com in the very obvious http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Vehicles/Parts_and_Accessories/Exterior/Roof_Racks_and_Carriers/ category. The unique content that is available on this site certainly merits this consideration.

A quick glance at the Roof_Racks_and_Carriers category suggests that other sites have been blessed with this favorable opinion. For instance, www.carracksdirect.com is listed in this category when clearly they are a part of www.outdoorsports.com.

We are certainly grateful that you are not dismissing our plea and are continuing to review it. Thank you.

Actually you will notice that the Car Racks Direct link in that category takes you to http://www.outdoorsports.com/ . Possibly another case of the title needing changing.

I am concerned that possibly the editors are not taking the time to fully devote the time that each site deserves in its evaluation. Any editor that would actually take the time to click through the Car Racks Direct listing in the Rack_Carriers category would see that it does resolve to the www.carracksdirect.com website, regardless of what the url in the dmoz listing displays. Changing its title would once again prove to be alarmingly confusing to searchers. This is the same scenario that occurred when our listing was carelessly removed from the Racks_Carriers category and placed in the http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Recreation/Outdoors/? Category. In which case, the searcher is left scratching his head why a site title would characterize the site as a car rack dealer, when the description suggests that it offers snowshoes etc?

These are very obvious situations where the editors should realize that not allowing sites to be listed that contain very relevant information for specific subjects such as car racks is damaging the DMOZ reputation. Car Racks are an excellent example of a subject that requires an entire site to be devoted to that subject in order to offer suitable content for searchers researching the subject. Again, editors taking the time to look through ORS Racks Direct would quickly realize that this isn't content that can be slapped into another site. The subject of Car Racks is vast, and a glimpse of the site navigation and architecture of ORS Racks Direct can attest to this. This subject requires its own site to provide all the information necessary for searchers. We have provided this because searchers simply demand this kind of service.

Merely a suggestion, but perhaps this could be one of the reasons Google has heavily downgraded the Google directory presence because of its association with DMOZ and its inability to continue categorizing relevant sites, a situation Google simply cannot afford to be critisized for. Relevance is everything and DMOZ should be more open as to how they can acheive this. It's simply no coincidence that Google's enjoys the coveted reputation as the best resource to research and find information in any category, and a search for *car racks* at Google returning ORS Racks Direct at the top.

Perhaps you may even feel car racks isn't a subject that even merits this discussion, but I can tell you that our livelihood at ORS Racks Direct very much depends on it. Thank you again.

First, comparing your site (a business site) to epinions (an information site) is definitely an apples and oranges situation which I don't believe deserves any further comment.

If we had got the feedback from Google that you allude to, we might well have listened and at least discussed it more, but the feedback we got was different from that.

Likewise, your points have a definite after-taste of self-interest, I'm afraid. You want the ODP to be relevant, but in a way that you, the site owner, feels is relevant. You are projecting your views of what is valuable content onto the web surfer.

The collective consciousness of the ODP, levelled out by all the differing self-interests of editors, has come to a different conclusion, which has led to the guidelines that the ODP uses.

I don't believe that we are going to be able to convince you that the way we do things is best, and I believe that the reverse also holds.

You and your company, and the ODP editors have differing views of the web. Nothing wrong with that at all - you build your web site according to your view of it, and we will build ours in our way. We (the collected assemblage of several thousand editors and many years of decision-making) believe that the guidelines we have provide the best web directory. If you or Google doesn't agree for whatever reason, that's not immediate grounds for us to change the way we do things.

This is not intended to be arrogant - it is a vision - it may be right or it may be wrong, I don't know, but many of us feel that it should not be watered down by appealing to the lowest common denominator. From day one of the project, and at regular intervals since then, we have had detractors claiming the coming of the ODP apocalypse, making statements about it losing its relevancy or being mis-managed or whatever. It still survives, in spite of those people's opinions.

Things are far from perfect - no editor would claim that the ODP is error-free. But as you will notice if you look at the Abuse forum, correcting the real errors (as opposed to the ones perceived by self-interested site owners) in the system is a high priority for editors. If something has been mis-listed, either through editorial error, or the site contents changing, we will strive to correct that. What we will NOT do is perpetuate those problems by listing more sites incorrectly.

I don't think it takes a *self-interested* website marketing coordinator to take great offense of your characterization of epinions as a content site and ORS Racks Direct as anything short of that. It is glaringly transparent that epinions is nothing but a glorified affiliate site whose prime directive is to get visitors to click through to other sites because the livelihood of epinions employees depends on it. ORS Racks Direct, on the other hand, is a destination site offering voluminous content that really does answer visitors needs because the livelihood of our employees depends on it.

Furthermore, do you really feel that it is fair and egalitarian to offer epinions hundreds upon hundreds of links within the DMOZ directory while dismissing other sites entirely. Would there really be catastrophic results if the editors of DMOZ offered one more *deeper link* poiningt to ORS Racks Direct as well.

This really is an obvious difference that merits far more consideration.

Perhaps. The next consideration would, I think, be to decide whether the penalty laid out in the submittal policy for your actions should be applied immediately. Depending on how that is decided, other dealings with the site might well be mooted.

I'm not exactly sure what that means. But I do feel that I've at least expressed my concerns sufficiently and will now let the editors make their final decisions on whether or not our website should ultimately be reinstated and placed back in the appropriate category. Thank you.