JohnKelly - 4:10 pm on Aug 2, 2005 (gmt 0)

Looks like I'm late to the party, but here's my situation:

I run several web sites, the oldest has been around since 1995, another since 1998 and yet another since 2003. All of these three pre-date AdSense and have unique content.

In 2003 (again, before AdSense launched) I added a section on each site for ODP listings. This was done both as a service to visitors and to hopefully get more pages indexed, bringing in more traffic. The ODP section on each site was the same, except for the site layout and theme which was naturally different for each site. Since there are hundreds of thousands of pages in the ODP, this formed the bulk of the sites' pages by default.

When AdSense came out I placed it on each of the three sites. I also created some additional sites, some with ODP, others without.

Since Spring 2004 my Google traffic has diminished, but Y/MSN has rise. Before the plunge a few days ago, Google was less than 5% of the referrals on my biggest site. So I hardly feel this latest purge. But obviously I would like to get re-listed. And I'm not going to drop the ODP sections since they still bring in traffic and revenue from other sources.

None of the sites are "scraped". The ODP RDF dump was used, and content is delivered via a MYSql database. The ODP copyright notice is on all pages, which meets the usage requirements. The simple fact that I use ODP on my sites doesn't mean I'm a scraper, especially since each site can stand on it's own content without ODP pages.

The ODP encourages others to use it's data, which is why the publish the RDF dump and even have a section in their directory for sites using ODP data.

Of course, it's Google's decision to keep sites or drop them. I just think that a better course of action would have been to:

1) Publicly announce (via WW and elsewhere) that they would be taking steps to eliminate ODP clones.

2) Only remove the sections of sites that contained ODP data, leaving the rest of the sites intact.

3) Determine which sites used ODP data only, and which only used ODP data to "seed" their directory, perhaps keeping the latter indexed.

This is a sorry state of affairs indeed. I'm getting very tired of the constant Google upheavals.