Status of http://www.docancun.com

Hello, Could you please let me know the status of http://www.docancun.com submitted approximately 2 years ago, and again approximately 2 months ago, to: http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_Amer...un/Travel_and_Tourism/Guides_and_Directories/

Thank you!
Lynda

Hello,
I'm not sure how this process works and don't mean to be a nag... But as far as I can tell I have the oldest post in the forum that has not yet received a status update (6 March) - not sure if I've been "lost in the shuffle" or whether status updates are only done by editors for the particular category within the regional directory to which I've submitted. Any info would be appreciated. Thanks!

Um, and when was it last submitted?

Nobody has responded because a status report isn't available for your site yet. By all means return to this thread in a month's time and ask again .

Thank you! I'll check back in a month.

Hello, Bumping the thread after one month for a status check, as instructed. Thank you!

Hello - Still patiently waiting for a status update, originally requested on March 6. On March 10 I was told to bump thread in a month. I bumped the thread on April 27 and still no status update. If there is no status available, does that mean I should I resumbit to the directory? Thank you!

It was declined as being a fraternal mirror of another site, which, in the past I can definitely see. If it is your only online presence in the Travel industry (not just cancun travel) re-suggest the site and place a note to the editor in brackets at the end of the description [just like this].

Also please don't re-suggest the site if you are an affiliate booker, thats spam as far as we are concerned. If you run an actual office with agents who do bookings, fine.

:tree:

Thanks, gimmster, for the helpful response. The site is not a fraternal mirror of another site, and it is our only online presence. It contains a lot of original travel info content (in my opinion, more than any other site listed), and has 360 virtual tours of about 90% of the hotels in Cancun and the Riviera Maya that we spent months doing ourselves. The only other site that has those tours at this point is one that I sold the use of the tours to for use on their site.

I realize that you can't get into a discussion about this with me, but I'd just like to make a comment about the affiliate hotel bookings. Especially in the case where it's not a traditional affiliate partnership - merely a service to handle the security, credit card payments, etc for smaller sites - more of a booking engine. We have our own pages for each hotel, not merely a link to another site. In fact, many small hotels use these services for their own online reservations on their web sites because of the sometimes prohibitive cost of having a merchant account with credit card companies, etc. If there is duplicate content in the hotel descriptions, it is often because the hotel PR departments release that info as the info they wanted published about their hotels.

The category to which I submitted is a mess, and it's frustrating to see the rules sporadically applied. Of the 24 sites listed in that category, over half of them have affiliate links for their hotel reservations (3 of them use the same booking engine that we do), one has no links that work, one is so full of annoying pop up ads that one can barely stand to look at the site, and another is borderline pornography.

I'm wondering -- Does ODP differentiate between affiliate links and booking engines, and, if so, what is the criteria for determining the difference, and is that something that could be noted in brackets with a submission?

Anyway - I do appreciate your helpful response and my beef is not with you at all, just venting some frustration with the process. Thanks.

>Does ODP differentiate between affiliate links and booking engines

The ODP differentiates between websites by and for people who actually provide services, and websites who advertise services that they don't actually provide. We don't care about the mechanism of the advertisement.

Thus, a hotel site, created or authorized by the folk who run the hotel, describing who they are and what they'll do for money -- listable by definition, EVEN IF NO ONLINE BOOKING IS SUPPORTED.

Online booking for that hotel -- not listable. If the hotel wants people to know about the online booking, they can put a link to it on their own site.

But -- online booking doesn't automatically DISQUALIFY a site (if it's not the primary purpose of the site) -- it's just like any other advertisements or background noise. We'll get over or past it if we can.

This is a hard concept for marketroids to get around. What makes them the money, is worse than worthless to us -- it's just noise. What is precious to us, what gets sites listed, ... doesn't DIRECTLY make money.

So we get lots of sites that are (from our point of view) "lowballing" -- that is, trying by repeated experiments at our expense to figure out how LITTLE actual value they can provide, without interfering with the source of income. Just having that attitude present in their brain, basically means they can't create a site we'd be interested in -- their primary purpose is the advertising, and it shows.

So -- don't talk to us about your advertisements. Don't talk to us about your lead-generation or order-taking features. They are nothing to us, we don't care about them, we just want to be able to get PAST them to the REAL content.

Who are YOU? What do YOU know? What will YOU do for money? That's what matters.

Hotels, golf courses, dry cleaners, we don't care who advertises on your site.

Thanks for the insight. I was trying to sort out 1. Your statement that affiliate bookers are spam and should not submit, but 2. There are affiliate bookers already listed, and that 3. The editorial guidelines that state: "General rule of thumb: Look at the content on the site, mentally blocking out all affiliate links. If the remaining information is original and valuable informational content that contributes something unique to the category's subject, the site may be a good candidate for the ODP."

Along with your recent post, I'm gathering that affiliate links or booking engines or whatever one calls them -- those will be ignored and the site will be judged on other content.

So if I am in fact not a fraternal mirror site and it is my only online presence and I have more original "travel guide" content than travel reservations, I could resubmit in the future and assume it would be reviewed on content other than "affiliate" links, and the presence of them does not necessarily exclude a listing, correct? Or in such cases is it better to submit a page deeper into the site (i.e., the "travel guide" part of the web) rather than the index page?

P.S. - To be fair, any "marketroid" worth her salt knows the basic tenet of providing value to the consumer/user and, in that way, "marketroids" and the ODP should be compatible bedfellows. Sites that do not try to provide value to the user are more like "marketroid-wannabes" ;-)

1. Your statement that affiliate bookers are spam and should not submit, but 2. There are affiliate bookers already listed,

Click to expand...

1 and 2 are not mutually exclusive. Some have slipped through, some sites have changed since they were listed.

If you want to do a "good thing" not only for yourself, but for your industry as well, help us out by identify any of the #2 you can identify and let us know via the abuse forum.

Will do. Thanks.

Two points.

(1) Marketroids "offer" value (presumably goods or services). The ODP list sites that "give" value (that is, information). There is a world of difference there in that simple distinction.

(2) If the off-site commercial links seem to be the "primary purpose" of the site -- and that's not just counted by number of pages. You might have thousands of cool pages hidden away in a back closet, but if all we can see at the door are the advertisements, we'll not recommend your place for a party.

For instance, as a rule of thumb: I'd suggest that having a "commercial links" bar along the top or left (or right or bottom) of each page is not unreasonable. Having the full Hotel reservation form on every page ... is. Having specific advertisement blocks, banners, etc., on every page is not out of line -- but if it starts getting hard for us to find the REAL content (the information), then it's over the line. The navigation is the same way -- make it as easy to find the content as it is to find the reservation form. (We see a lot of sites that pretend to be giant tourist guides, but when you start clicking, you always end up at their blasted affiliate reservation form. We aren't stupid, and we aren't impressed.)

I really don't understand why there aren't more good tourist guide sites out there. A digital camera, an hour a week wandering around the place: in a year, with almost no money down, you could have a photo gallery that we'd be falling all over ourselves to figure out how to deep-link. Kill the marketroids that write your tourist brochurs: and get the local newspaper reporters or college students (or anyone who's used to transmitting INFORMATION, not MARKETING) to write about the history, geography, culture, ecology, ... etc., etc., etc. of the place. We'd be begging you to branch out to the next tourist trap.

Exactly my feelings as well regarding travel guides. I started this site as a hobby because there were no good Cancun travel guides out there. It was a non-proft, no ads, no affiliate links, comprehensive Cancun travel guide for about half the time it's been in existance. Being the free-market-economy-lovin kind of gal that I am, I started offering travel reservations as well.

Now, just for the sake of example, since I know you can't discuss a specific site on this boards: All of the original content is still there on my site, with prominent links on the main page and every other page to "Travel Guide." The headline on the site is "Cancun Hotel and Travel Guide." I don't have a reservations form on my index page, nor any of my deeper pages, except for the page describing a particular hotel (presumably useful to the user). "Travel Guides" and "Travel Info" get just as much real estate in the navigation bars as hotel reservations do. I will put up my site against any of the current listed sites in that category for unique travel guide content.

P.S... um, the ODP lists hundereds of site that "offer" value, and not a lot of information (dry cleaners, locksmiths, etc.). And if giving value (information) is so important, then a site with affiliate links AND lots of valuable information would not be against the ODP philosophy, correct?

In response to http://resource-zone.com/forum/showpost.php?p=183240&postcount=1220 which refers to this thread:

No-one said in any post above that 'sites that include affiliate links are considered spam and should not be submitted'. You were told very specifically that affiliate booking sites (i.e. sites that offer affiliate booking as their primary purpose) should not be submitted. Everything that you were told was solidly in line with http://editors.dmoz.org/guidelines/ (see the Travel section particularly).

>P.S... um, the ODP lists hundereds of site that "offer" value, and not a lot of information (dry cleaners, locksmiths, etc.).

That's the marketroid analysis. And, no doubt, those folk hope to attract business by offering value via the websites.

But from the ODP perspective, these sites are not "sites ADVERTISING stuff", they are "sites of ENTITIES PROVIDING stuff." And that is absolutely critical, because the former is pure promotion by definition, and the latter may be considered information. Who is John Doe, P.C., and what will he do for money? Nobody but J.D. himself can answer that with authority! So that site is the uniquely authoritative source of information on a personal aspect of some industry and/or some community. And in addition, these sites offer UNIQUE services. Even if there are two plumbers in Podunk County, each one of them offers his own skills and schedule of services. But it's especially true if J.D. runs, say, the only 24-hour widget defenestration service in Podunk County -- not only unique content but absolutely unique service.

It doesn't matter how easy or complex it is to describe what J.D. does for money. To be listed, the website needs to be "just big enough" -- and that may take only a page or two.

Conversely, you could provide, say, an advertisement for J.D.W.D.P.C., and no matter what you said, it either wouldn't be unique or it wouldn't be authoritative. J.D.'s website speaks for J.D.

Or--you could provide your own personal description of J.D.'s sercices from a customer's viewpoint -- genuinely critical in the generic sense and at least potentially critical in the specific sense. That could be considered "consumer information" about J.D., and if the editor considered it "significant", it could count as content to be listed. (We list a lot of sites like "J.D. broke all our windows" or "J.D.'s W.D. technique causes ecological damage to the local starling population" or whatever.) But to categorize it, we'd ask whether that was about J.D., or that was a part of your personal jaundiced view of the world (and therefore about you.)

See? It's all about information.

jeanmanco - Thank you for the clarification. But unless the term "affiliate booker" by ODP definition implies that is their "primary purpose", I was not aware of that and the only posts that gave advice to me specifically (from gimmster and spectregunner) did not include the "primary purpose" part of it, and it was not at all clear. I found their posts very useful, but was just looking for clarification on that point.

Yes, Hutcheson mentioned "primary purpose", but I felt I had already been specifically told not to re-submit if I was an "affiliate booker" (not knowing that "primary purpose" may have indeed been part of what defines an "affiliate booker"), and didn't want to go through the re-submit process if there was no point. (And I didn't even read his most recent post because I find his continued use of the term "marketroid" offensive.)

I'm not going to read this thread anymore, so no replies necessary. I need to find a softer wall to bang my head against....

ok, one more post for anyone interested in the affiliate question...

Just found this post re: affiliate links from jimnoble. Wish I had seen it earlier. Exactly what I was looking for and brilliantly succint!

http://resource-zone.com/forum/showpost.php?p=156814&postcount=2