www.downersgrovemortgage.com

http://www.downersgrovemortgage.com/

Waiting for status; 30+ days.

Thanks,
-Matt

Well, you have the 30+ days part correct; what you missed was the part about providing us with a clickable link to the category where you made your submission.

Once you provide that we will be good to go.

My apologies:

http://www.dmoz.org/Business/Financial_Services/Mortgages/Regional/United_States/Illinois/

Thanks,
-Matt

As far as I can see, http://www.downersgrovemortgage.com/ and http://www.promortgagepartners.com/ are very similar. :thumb1:

Who is http://www.promortgagepartners.com? A link at the bottom of your page.

I think this may be just another one of those "real estate template business card site generator" schemes.

Usually the generated sites aren't listable -- they don't have the minimal unique content, even measured by the notoriously liberal Regional requirements.

It's not that hard to evaluate. Block out (and ignore ALL the content that's the same on all the sites. Then block out and ignore all the merely promotional verbiage (John Doe is YOUR agent. He will work hard for you to find the best possible fooblatz at the best prices. Come to John Doe for all your blatzish needs...)

If you've blocked everything in site, stop here. This site isn't worth visiting until the navigation is fixed.

If there is more visible: it's unique, and it is truly information (not precatory marketroid-speak) then see if it will fit on a 3x5 card. If so, what you have is not a website, it's a yellow pages ad in drag.

If not, then there may actually be a website worth listing. Now we'll look around to see if this is the best URL, or if there is (perhaps only potentially) a better URL from the same entity, with more content relevant to this category. But for these sites, I don't think we'll get this far.

empty of content?

hutcheson -

I don't think you've been entirely fair with considering our submission.

First, www.promortgagepartners.com is not listed in the Directory, so I am not trying to "slip by" duplicate sites for marketing purposes. Professional Mortgage Partners, Inc., is based in Downers Grove, Illinois, and is owned by the person profiled on www.downersgrovemortgage.com. We chose this URL because it best represents the company.

Second, that is not canned content on the page. Mary wrote it, and while it has been used by other Loan Officers for the company on their sites (nearly half, but we're still only talking ~10 people), they have every capability of customizing the content as they see desire.

Third, I don't understand why this is treated any differently than similar car dealerships in the same geographic region. They each offer the same product, often with the same content and backend systems, yet each of them can get listed in the Directory because they are owned by different people. Loan Officers, even those within the same company, are competitive entities that share resources for cost-effectiveness. The same goes for Realtors: there are 606 Realty Executives sites, often with several individuals from the same office listed in the Directory under a single category.

I'm not trying to be unreasonable: I took every measure to do this appropriately, but feel like I'm being brushed off as a site-spammer.

Please reconsider your position.

Thanks,
-Matt

bump

still no reply @ 60 days.

OK, this really is simple. There are two hurdles that a website has to get past, to be listed in a "Business" category. First (the hurdle with the largest pile of hamstrung athletes behind it) there has to be a business that the website is about. "I own fifty-seven businesses, and every mother's son of them engages in no actual activity whatsoever, but possesses as sole asset a site of extraordinarily quality content containing more of what people want! (which is, apparently in this bizarre view of the world either "more advertising" or "to pay more for products than the seller would be willing to take").

Well, assume you pass that test -- you say here that you do, and offhand I have no evidence otherwise. OK, but there's another hurdle.

The website has to be about the company, and there has to be enough information that is relevant (about the company, that is) for us to ignore the duplicate material and irrelevancies (such as advertisements.)

Suppose "John Doe, Widget Crafter Extraordinaire" sets up a website. One page, just his name, phone number, and "serving all the hinterlands of Ulan Bator with the finest handcrafted widgets".

That's a website, and it's about a real person, but there's no more content than the cheapest Yellow Pages Ad. It is rejected for "insufficient content."

Now, suppose "Lazy Lou Web Development, Inc." creates a website for "John Doe, Widget Crafter Extraordinaire." From other websites he copies information about the history of widgets; perhaps out of the depths of his own widgetless experience he writes whole tomes about the joys of owning widgets; he adds a few words about picking out your own widget -- and somewhere he puts in "John Doe, your best widget crafter, 555-5555"

Well, the first time we see that page, we might list it, having not checked carefully to see how vapid or repetitive the verbiags is. But ... now LLWD sells a website to Richard Roe, Experienced Widget Carver. "cp -r" on the directory, 20 seconds' careful work with a cheap text editor, and voila! a new website.

Is this site worth listing? It certainly fails the "more than business card content" site! Now, was the first site WORTH listing? In retrospect, it was assuredly NOT!

Now, editors make such checks of uniqueness as we, in our experience, deem proper -- and an experienced editor may be able to smell "small business card in a large template cesspool" further away than it seems physically possible. The reason is, that experienced editor probably still has singed eyebrows from all the sites "Torpid Tom, Fast Web Creator" submitted last month.

Now, for YOUR purposes, a template site may be good enough. It contains some (non-unique) information that may help your clients, and you can put the URL on your business cards and Yellow Pages advertisements. It contains lots of verbiage that may make it help rank almost as well in the search engines as any of LLWD's other 100 customers, if perhaps not so well as TTFWC's 1000 customers. But for a client who is not already yours, (that is, our customers the general surfers), it really contains nothing that they could not find just as well many other places. Even the unique information would be more readily found (in a more useful context) in the Yellow Pages or Google Local Search -- fine information resources with which the ODP does not and cannot compete.

Two hurdles. Gotta be a business. Gotta have (at least) more information than the phone book contains.

So that's where we are. You say:

"I don't think you've been entirely fair with considering our submission...www.promortgagepartners.com is not listed in the Directory." But see, that just proved we ARE being absolutely fair! (And if in any way we aren't being fair umpiring THIS hurdle, and you can find any more templates from the same folk that DID slip by inexperienced or careless or unlucky editors and get in -- why then, we'll remove them also. How much fairer can you get?

thank you to whoever

Although it's not necessarily what we wanted, thanks to whichever editor added our corporate site to the Directory.

I will assert one last time the logic behind our "individual" submission:

Like Real Estate Agents, many loan officers are individually competitive, not just within their market but also against other officers within the same company.

Any number of the Real Estate Agent sites listed in the Directory are cookie-cutter sites for the individuals, who are 99% of the time not businesses unto themselves -- most are desk jockeys within "Re/Max United" or some such franchise office of a greater corporation.

One could argue that:
A) Only Re/Max should have a listing, as it is a business and has uniqueness.
B) Only the local office (i.e., "Re/Max United") should have a listing, because all of the agents within that office are not unique businesses.
C) Real Estate Agents should not get individual listings because their sites are templated by Number1Xpert, Point2Agent, BirdView, WebPointCentral, and a myriad of other national "real estate web site" providers. Maybe 1 in 50 is custom.

Does that make my point more clear?

-Matt

a cited example

I would also like to point out that a Loan Officer for a different company did get his individual listing in the directory, alongside our company:

http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_Amer...wners_Grove/Business_and_Economy/Real_Estate/

The third listing, Steve Depolis, is an inidividual working for a bank, which, even more ironically, is not the bank named in his Directory listing.

-Matt

mattlavallee said:

One could argue that:
A) Only Re/Max should have a listing, as it is a business and has uniqueness.
B) Only the local office (i.e., "Re/Max United") should have a listing, because all of the agents within that office are not unique businesses.
C) Real Estate Agents should not get individual listings because their sites are templated by Number1Xpert, Point2Agent, BirdView, WebPointCentral, and a myriad of other national "real estate web site" providers. Maybe 1 in 50 is custom.

Click to expand...

All points have been argued in the internal fora. As for point C, though, we don't care if a site is templated -- we're looking for unique information. We don't care about a unique format. The agent's bio could be considered unique, while a non-templated site could easily have nothing other than links to other real estate sites.

but the tests...

I'm now more confused: how do Real Estate Agents and this other Loan Officer guy pass the "gotta be a business" and uniqueness tests, as noted by Hutcheson, when they are neither?

-Matt

"Gotta be a business" -- not exactly the requirement, as I understand it. We have listed a car salesman group, each individual of which works for a different dealer. Uniqueness is more difficult -- I list too many RE sites as it is, so I'm not the one to ask.