Status: http//:store.bar-stool-classics.com

Please provide status for site: http//:store.bar-stool-classics.com (site title: Bar Stool Classics) submitted to the following catagory:

http://www.dmoz.com/Shopping/Home_and_Garden/Furniture/Seating/Stools/

Thank you.

The submission does not meet our Site Selection Criteria and has been deleted accordingly.

RE: status of http//:store.bar-stool-classics.com

Can you please let me know what specific criteria we do not meet? I read the guidelines and do not see what we fail to meet.

Also if you look at the other sites that ARE listed in the category to which we submitted, our site is certainly along the same lines and deserves to be included. The link to the submitted category is below.

http://www.dmoz.com/Shopping/Home_and_Garden/Furniture/Seating/Stools/

Thank you.

I'm sorry, but we don't go into specifics.

The company's site is waiting review there under a different URL. Do not resubmit ANY related URLs. Your violation of the ODP submittal policies HAS harmed the company.

I'd recommend checking back in six months for another status: once a company gets a reputation for sneaky stuff, it's sites are more likely to get deleted out of hand, even where they might be eligible for listing.

RE: Sneaky Stuff?

I sincerely do not know what you mean by "sneaky stuff". What have I done? I'm not trying to be sneaky. I truly do not know what submittal rule I have broken. I am not technically savy enough to do "sneaky stuff".

We simply signed on with Yahoo!'s new Merchant Solutions Product and transferrred our bar stool products there: http://store.bar-stool-classics.com. This left our furniture store on Yahoo! Store at www.creativeclassics.com. Bar Stool Classics ships all over the US. It is a national store that we have requested to be in a Shopping category. Is there a technical problem with this that I do not understand? They are two different entities with different domains and different products. They do link to each other. Is that the problem?

Please tell me what I have done wrong. It is certainly not intentional. I do not understand at all what you mean. Please tell me!

They are not two different entities. And they are not different products.

But the domains do link to each other, which tells me that whatever you were doing sneaky, you were not doing MALICIOUSLY.

For ODP internal purposes, we prefer to list canonical root domains, so that if one entity has multiple listings, they all use the same URL. (This helps protect us against one form of spam that is considered particularly noxious:
"product-line vanity domains", which staff repeatedly and urgently reminds us must not be listed.) From our point of view, the bar stool URL looks like the first of potentially many PLVD's, and we rouse the lynch mob immediately. (I do not apologize for that: I only wish that we could burn real tar and feathers.) And I realize that companies may have their own agendas driving their way of splitting their content across domains, and -- it is their website, not ours. All we control is what we choose to list. And we are pleased not to consider listing "related" domains. (If that means a company doesn't have all its content visible from our directory because it doesn't have all its content visible from their website, that was their choice.)

But that wasn't your company's choice, and so it looks to me like creativeclassics.com is listable in shopping as well as regional -- that is, it DOES seem to be the website of a genuine company, and it DOES contain at least some of the necessary information for ordering product (or, which is all the same to us, it links to the necessary information contained on another server but controlled by the same entity. How you do your shopping cart is an implementation detail.)

That's why I say, "recheck on the status of creativeclassics.com in Shopping" -- to make sure it doesn't get deleted because of a suboptimal submittal history. (And I'll add -- if the company decides to add other mail-order lines, then request moving the Shopping listing to a more general category, rather than adding a new URL or new listing.)

Thank you very much for answering my inquiry. I appreciate you taking the time to do so. However, it was a little technical for me. I'd appreciate if you could clarify some things for me and perhaps provide advice?

I think what you are saying is that it looks like I split off the bar stools into a separate site for promotional reasons and to get two listings in DMOZ.

That was not the intent at all. The challenge for my business is that I have two different things (at least in my mind) going on: a "brick and mortar" store that sells furniture and an e-commerce store that specializes in bar stools.

I do not sell the other furniture items online, they are available to local customers only. Originally the Creative Classics website only had my bar stools on it. I started adding the furniture items to my website as a "take away" catalog of sorts for my local customers who kept asking me for a catalog. Print catalogs are very expensive to produce so I decided that I should add my furniture items to our website for informational purposes for my local customers so they would have something to refer to when they went home.

The problem this presented was that the online bar stool customers were confused by this and would constantly email and call us for pricing information on the furniture items. They would also complain about not being able to order the items online, etc. I tried to explain to them that I felt that large furniture purchases should be made in person where one can see, feel and ask in-depth questions. (My furniture is not inexpensive). But many people would get irate.

I do not want to sell large furniture items over the web. Shipping large items presents many logistical problems that I am not equipped to deal with. The bar stools are UPS-able and dropped shipped from the manufacturer - perfect for e-commerce. So I decided I should make my bar stools a separate site. I was also concerned that adding all the furniture items to my website had made it less relevant for ranking high in bar stools (the whole purpose of the site originally.)

So now in my mind, I have two different things going on: an informational catalog for my "brick and mortar" furniture store and an e-commerce Bar Stool store. They link together because I own both (I did not know this was considered "sneaky") but in general bar stool consumers find the bar stool site because that is what they are searching and my local customers find the store site because my URL is on my business cards and advertising.

I do Google Adwords for the bar stool site to promote it. I do not promote Creative Classics online. So I do not understand why this is a bad thing. I have no intention of splitting off every section of my site: living rooms, bedrooms, etc. I just wanted to split off the e-commerce section from the informational section. I thought it would be less confusing for customers.

What I think that you are saying then, is that, owning sites with two separate agendas is a bad thing because one is considered a subset of the other to DMOZ. To me Creative Classics is a regional furniture store and Bar Stool Classics is a national online bar stool store and that is why I thought that it was proper for both to be listed in DMOZ as such.

So, if I am understanding you properly, I should just give up because this is seen as a marketing scheme to DMOZ. Is that correct?

Well, yes, but I wouldn't put it so harshly. Having two domains for your different marketing purposes is in no way a bad thing. It's just that by our rules, in our directory, we will only list one of them.

Having your company's content spread out over two domains is not "good" or "bad" -- it just "is the way you did it." From our point of view, it is one site by one entity (the company) about one subject (the company) regardless of how many domains it is spread out over. And we make an effort (for our purposes) to use the same domain name (and if convenient even the same URL) for each ODP listing the site has.

No, I didn't say you had split off the content to get separate ODP listings. I said (or at least implied) that many people do split websites for that reason. (And some people split websites to get extra search engine results, which is not exactly the same thing. And there are other reasons for doing it. We provide information, not marketing, and we want our automatic tools to be able to find all listings for the same site, so for OUR purposes one domain name is better.)

Mostly we don't judge your purposes. I presume you're trying to make money by promoting the goods and services you're offering. That's OK, but that's not our purpose. Our purpose is to let people in Alexandria find information about their neighborhood, and we don't care why they want to know.

A website may be listed in both Regional and Shopping categories in the ODP, but we prefer to use the same domain name for all listings.

I'm not sure what you mean by "give up." If you mean "give up on promoting the alternate domain name", yes, I think you should. If you mean "give up on a second listing for the website", I do not see that it's time for that yet. Bookmark this thread, and if the site hasn't yet shown up in Shopping in six months, ask about it again.

Thanks for the replies.

Thank you both for the replies. I think I finally understand.