Vacation Rentals Category.

Can any of the DMOZ editors inform me if the rumours are true that DMOZ is not adding any further websites to the above category within 'Lodging'?

It would be nice to know so I don't (and many other owners of Vacation Rental websites) don't have to waste their time submission requests within this forum.

Best Wishes,
Darren

>It would be nice to know so I don't (and many other owners of Vacation Rental websites) don't have to waste their time submission requests within this forum.

Start by reading the category description. Vacation rental sites should be submitted TO THE LOCALITY CONTAINING THE VACATION RENTAL.

Vacation rental DIRECTORIES should, again, be submitted to the proper subcategory.

The usual caveat applies: small directories need to be very very focused to be useful to surfers. The chance of a global directory appearing with enough unique content to warrant "comprehensiveness" at a top level is below zero, for surprisingly small values of zero. So, yes, I'd expect all new listings to go into the regional subcategories.

A rule of thumb: within that focus (usually geographic) they should show unique content, size and comprehensiveness at least comparable to the ODP, as well as evidence of continued support -- we know how much effort it takes to keep a directory from going stale. 99.99% of the "directories" on the web won't measure up to the current standards. (In fact, the ODP doesn't measure up to the current standards.)

Another rule of thumb: directories are only useful when the user has to look through fewer listings (on the average) to find a specified site, by going to the directory sites FIRST. Obviously, the ideal is to list all the websites in the ODP, and not list any directories -- that way, the user sees all the websites once in one place. And the worst possible situation is when there are many more directories than sites ... as in Orlando and Las Vegas. The surfer has to look through much more content just to get the same information -- that's why we keep saying such directories are worse than worthless: every single one removed from the web makes the surfer's job easier!

So the second criterion is: looking only at the directories that are LARGER than yours, how many listings do you have that at least one of them doesn't have, and how many of their listings would the surfer have to go past (starting with the largest directory first, of course) to get to your content? If the answer is "several times more listings than there are actual websites to be listed", then your site is probably not worth listing -- we'd do better just "mining" it for links, then discarding the husk. If the vast majority of its sites are already in the ODP, then it's not worth mining.

With this in mind, rather than spamming the Directory category with small paid-classified ads for individual property websites, my recommendation would be to offer (as part of the services that come with sold listings) submittal to the PROPER category of the ODP, which will usually be a locality, and will often get a quick review. (There are exceptions: Orlando is a dismal swamp of doorway pages leading to directories leading to blind lead generators for agents for directories of doorway pages ... legitimate sites with unique content (such as actually offering a unique house they actually own) tend to get buried in the muck. But for the most part, submittals to the CORRECT regional categories tend to get listed fairly quickly. And correct placement of submittals is a genuine service you can offer individual webmasters, who usually think submitting to the top level of Vacation Rentals is a Real-Clever-Idea, and (since they only have one site) won't learn better soon enough to be of any use to themselves or to us.

Dear hutcheson,

Thank you for your detailed explanation of why most, if not all, vacation rental directory sites will no longer be accepted into the main directory.

What you said here makes complete sense.

You say that

"...Obviously, the ideal is to list all the websites in the ODP, and not list any directories -- that way, the user sees all the websites once in one place."

Many wonderful, unique vacation rentals do not have their own websites and only promote their properties in particular directories.

In cases such as these, would you suggest, and is it acceptable for a directory to submit a "unique" property to the specific regional vacation directory of DMOZ, even so the page that is being submitted is part of the vacation rental directory?

I like your idea of offering a service to owners who list on a site, and with your blessing will begin to offer to submit the owner's own site to the appropriate DMOZ regional vacation rental directory.

Depending on your feedback regarding unique properties where the owner doesnt have a site, I can offer to submit the owner's directory listing to DMOZ.

And please accept my apologies for taking an argumentative stance with you. I am here to learn more and to follow DMOZ guidelines and perhaps with some guidance assist.

Thank you for your consise response.

Firstly, my site covers holiday accommodation in four different continents, how can I sumbit to say the Florida state category, when I have accommodations in California, Nevada, and other countries in Europe?

Surely the category I have submitted my site to is the type of category that I should be submitting to, surely? If not, in your expert opinion as an editor from looking at my website which category should I be submitting to?

Only global vacation rental directories should be listed in this category.
Vacation rental directories which cover only a single continent, country, or smaller region should be submitted to the appropriate geographic category
Sites for individual vacation rentals will only be listed according to the city or town where they are located.

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Also, it shouldn't matter how many properties you have on your database, I offer a unique service where if I do not have accommodations which match the holidaymakers requirements I search the internet for them, and use directories like DMOZ to perform that service.

It is interesting what DMOZ thinks of directories though.

Darren

What the ODP thinks of directories is inevitable, from its design and construction. We think they're valuable, if done right. We care about how they're done.

As for submitting individual property pages from directories: this is not absolutely forbidden. If a property doesn't have its own site, and the "individual property pages" are substantial enough to count as mini-sites, then listing them is sometimes done. We wouldn't list more than one site for a property, and IIRC we have never found a directory with all its property pages substantial enough to deeplink. I'd recommend contacting an editor with specific examples, I'd strongly disrecommend (as counterproductive and possibly fatal for your hopes) blanket submittals of all the property pages.

As for sites with one listing in Turkey, two in Brazil, and the rest in southern Alabama -- we use an 80% rule-of-thumb: the category that best fits 80% of the site content is better than an over-general category. The off-topic content is comparable to, say, Geocities paid ads on free sites -- worthless or less than worthless (to the SURFER), because it's not in a proper category with lots of other closely related sites.

A non-comprehensive category, if worse than the best, is worse than nothing at all.

I'm sorry if I appear arguementative, it's just your comments to this thread have seriously confused me. I have properties in various locations, with the majority in Florida, California, Spain, Cyprus, Portugal, all with an equal percentage (near enough) are you saying that I could submit my website in these locations, or just one of them, say Spain?

How will the editor gauge if I have chosen the correct Region of Spain, when I submitted the website and I then get 100 holiday home owners coming to me from France, and that means that the percentage has increased in favour of France, do you move my website everytime I receive a different country with a higher percentage of properties?

Surely this is the reason to have a category as you have as Vacation Rentals, otherwise the editors are going to be swomped under with my suggestions and edits?

I may mention my website as being a 'Directory' but I don't just dump the properties on and hope that someone comes along to make a booking with the owner. I've worked in the marketing and travel sector for many years, and we work with these clients to get them bookings.

I'd appreciate your comments.

Thanks,
Darren

(1) You're describing the problems inherent in passing a large collection of billboards off as a reference. What you are describing is fundamentally the difference between a directory and a FFA link farm with a price tag stapled on. Yes, I think such a site will probably remain eternally unlistable as a directory. (Last year's Greensheet will never find a place in the Library -- unless the librarian keeps a pet parrot. The ODP is more like a library than a billboard -- that is its design, that is its unique focus, and it has little competition. There are many billboards on the internet; neither we nor they have a need for us to compete with them.)

(2) I repeat, to be valuable to users, you must focus and organize. Even the Greensheet does that (and as a result, even though it's all advertisements, it's still useful.) Information in the wrong place is worse than no information at all -- not only can it not be found, it hides the information that could otherwise be found. And the right place is with other information like it. If a focus doesn't fall into your lap, you'll have to make it yourself.

One alternative is to provide valuable free content, as a way of bribing the ODP to list a site. (This seems like a trivial and obvious approach to me, but I admit that most marketroids seem to consider it incomprehensible and impossible.) The only difficulty is that creating valuable content takes work -- which can be seen as distracting from the main goal of making money.

There is a massive conflict of interest there, and 99% of such sites never successfully resolve it in a way that provides any commonality with the ODP. That's fine -- they don't have to link to us, and we don't have to link to them. I don't want to give encouragement, because of 100 people that read it and misapprehended it to offer hope, 99 will be disappointed and bitter at what they see as time wasted pursuing unprofitable altrusim.

The short advice is: if you're running marketing sites, or if you're running a marketing business using websites, probably don't bother submitting except somewhere in the Business/Advertising section -- presumably, you use the web to attract paying customers. It is no problem at all for you to have no interest in common with the ODP. The net is large enough for both of us.

Your comments have confused the hell out of me. I came on here to ask what to me are easy questions to answer in one line answers.

Are you submitting websites to the Vacation Rental category?

If this is not the correct category for a website which offers holiday homes for rental in four continents which category should it be submitted in?

If I spend time submitting to the Spain regional pages, is it going to get rejected because I have holiday homes in other regions outside of Spain.. I think so. I'm not going to design my website so that it fits ODP, but when I submit any website to a directory I always ensure that it meets that directories TOS.

Yes, I am agree that the vacation rentals category gets alot of SPAM, I've seen it for myself on SE's but because a large number of companies do this does it mean that every single person who submits a website in this category is also trying to SPAM ODP.. I certainly am not.

All I want to know is if my website will be reviewed on the ODP, if not, fair enough, I will move on. I'm not here to make trouble I just want an answer to the questions that I raise.

if you're running marketing sites, or if you're running a marketing business using websites, probably don't bother submitting except somewhere in the Business/Advertising section -- presumably, you use the web to attract paying customers. It is no problem at all for you to have no interest in common with the ODP. The net is large enough for both of us.

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I don't want to submit my site to ODP to list my marketing services, I require my website to be submitted to ODP to give independant travellers a resource they can use to book holiday accommodation.

Many thanks
Darren

It's editorial judgment, based on perceived usefulness to surfers.

A random collection of advertised homes from around the world is not useful.

A comprehensive list of a well-defined category of advertised homes is useful.

The problem is, what you describe is much closer to the first than the second. If you have a clear focus, we can add to the description "also contains some listings worldwide."

You may have seen a discussion in these forums some time back about a directory focused on a European capital with some listings throughout the company. Compared to this, that was easy: the webmaster knew his focus and could describe it and tell us where we should have seen it on the site. We looked again, and saw it, and that was that. But he HAD A FOCUS.

You don't have that. and without that, there really may be no appropriate category in the ODP. So the next question is, "is this content valuable enough, DESPITE its lack of focus, for us to look for a place for it?" And the look-in-the-biggest-directory-first rule of thumb applies. If someone started at the biggest vacation homes directory, and looked at all the others before they got to yours, would they be totally exasperated by seeing so much duplication that they would have already given up and gone to the bar, and if not, would they be gratified by the amount of unique content your directory had?

How many thousand websites would that be? And how many of them would have focused on the area they really wanted to visit?

You're still thinking this is the beginning of "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, ... Mad World." It's not. It's the last scene, and the simple answer is, 99.99% of the directories will not be listed. Look at your directory, see if it's better than every one of the next ten thousand, and judge your chances.

A random collection of advertised homes from around the world is not useful.

A comprehensive list of a well-defined category of advertised homes is useful.

Click to expand...

It's very hard to comment sensibly when you have a particular site you are envisioning, but we can't see it and are limited to broad generalities. I'll attempt to paraphrase hutcheson's comments into something more directly useful to you.

I have properties in various locations, with the majority in Florida, California, Spain, Cyprus, Portugal

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If you have strong focus in each of these areas - say 100 unique properties in each - and created subsections of your site to focus on each of the states/countries, then it might be possible that each subsection could be listed at the corresponding state/country level. If in addition to the 5 strong focus areas, you had 1-5 properties in a variety of other European Countries or US states, we would either just ignore those, or depending on the quantity and distribution list at the European or US level (or a region if one appeared to correspond best to the site.)

What you don't want to be is a site with broad coverage but very little depth. The site won't compare to other sites at the broad coverage level but won't have enough content in subsections to be worth deeplinking. Many editors will have trouble deciding on placement and the site will either get bounced around or left to languish until it changes enough to place.

What the ODP thinks of directories is inevitable, from its design and construction. We think they're valuable, if done right.

Click to expand...

My opinion of a directory done right is one that has a good focus, offers detailed descriptions of the business/organization and the site, and provides complementary information pertinent to the focus. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of these. Most of the directories that are basically organized link lists are listed for three reasons (that I've seen):

1. They are really comprehensive and organized differently than ODP. Even if we mined the links, we'd still keep the directory because it's unique content is the organization.

2. They are local advertising directories with frequent fresh additions. Even if we mined the links, we'd still keep the directory because it frequently adds new sites for businesses and will always be ahead of the ODP.

3. They are directories that haven't been mined yet. If we could mine these, they'd get deleted.

Thank you lissa, it's the first opportunity I've had chance to respond to your post, since it's busy with the Easter vacation period coming up.

I understand what you are saying, and I've just being informed that I am actually now listed in DMOZ under where my business is located;

http://dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/West_Yorkshire/Pudsey/

Which is superb news!

Ideally though, I would like to be listed within a category which I think suits your searchers more. The majority of the properties are located in Spain and Florida, so would I be wasting my time submitting to these categories, and leaving it at that?

I think over time, these two locations will always have the highest number of properties, due to the popularity for European holidaymakers, which is what I am marketing the website on.

Your thoughts would be appreciated, and thanks to Hutcheson for also trying to explain, I just had to use the dictionary a few times to understand what you were trying to get at, but thanks for your responses.

Darren