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In the regional category that best fits the site, though, we'd be lumped into a veritable hodge-podge of loosely related services, and I don't think that anyone would ever find us, certainly not by browsing, even if they actually found the page.
In the Main listings, I'm seeing not only a bunch of regional and local sites listed (including some of our local competitors), but even one UK site. Some of these people also have Regional listings... some do not. I don't know whether they really belong in the main listings or not.
Any suggestions about how best to handle this kind of submission?
1. Less appropriate and the editor forwarding on to the lower category thus taking longer to be listed, or
2. Being deleted
If you have relevant content for two or more lower categories the change of being listed here improves greatly the more diverse you are.
You could also go to www.resource-zone.com and discuss what would be more appropriate.
Good luck! :)
- an online store shipping to different countries.
- an information site with globally-relevant information, e.g. a health information site.
- a local site with an information section that is useful for a wider audience - e.g. a local DIY store with a detailed guide on how to put up shelves and wire up electrical circuits.
ODP editors don't list you on the basis of where your competition is listed, they list you on the basis of the content of your site. They also don't list you on the basis of how easy it is to find a particular category.
The ODP is an international directory, not a US directory - any site with globally-relevant content can be listed in topical, whether it's from the US, the UK, India or Timbuctoo.
If you think that your competitors have been inappropriately listed then the right course of action is to query this in Resource Zone, not to ask to have your site inappropriately listed as well.
Anyone using the ODP looking for your site who knows how the ODP works probably would be more likely to check Regional.
Part of my dilemma is that, in this case, a lot of ODP editors haven't known how ODP works. I don't mean to be ODP-bashing in any way... I admire the idea and the editors who volunteer their time, and if I had the time I'd volunteer too. And I know it's an imperfect world.
I agree in principle with most that John_Caius has said, but in practice I don't see it working that way, at least not in this case. Clearly, it's impossible for a directory to provide a lot of granularity, or for a Regional listings to provide the same amount of granularity as international listings.
Just to play devil's advocate here... in the ideal world I do agree with John, but in the real world people looking for "in home widget repair," and many editors too, assume the "in home widget repair" category is the place to go. I don't believe that many think of Local Retail Businesses. So, should I be trying to change practice, or trying for a listing that maybe 1/3 of these local businesses in this fairly focussed area have gotten?
In cases like this you need to remember that the regional/topical breakdown has changed over time. Four years ago, when the ODP had, say, 10 traveling chefs, it seemed reasonable to have them all in one category, although all of them were providing services only in the region around their home. When the category gets to, say, the editors figure out "This isn't working, how do we subcategorize? ... Um, why are they in Topical anyway ... should have been in Regional all along?"
But we don't always get around to retrofitting all the old listings based on the new guidelines. So you still see, and are confused by, the old listings ... but you won't be able to get a new listing there.
If you are only offering a service, but bring no actual value to the directory, then you probably won't get listed at all.
No, not true. If you are offering an actual, unique service -- Something that you perform with your own grubby little hands and rusty little neurons, while you're wide awake --
if, say, you are the only person on earth who is able to send Joe Bob Jones, Jr. (a.k.a. "Buddy"), to fix plumbing problems in Podunk, N.J. -- then a website telling people what kind of problems Buddy can fix without help, and how to contact your dispatcher, and nothing else, may well constitute useful and unique content -- in the Podunk/Business_and_Economy category. This is true even if other plumbers have websites in the same directory.
The kind of "services" that aren't considered to add value are the kind of "e-businesses" that you can buy from unscrupulous web developers -- you know, the "let your website make money for you while you sleep," "build a lifetime residual income with only minutes of work a day," etc. The web developer does a global search and replace of "your_name_here" with your choice of alias, and voila! a new case of spam is born.
It may not be editor ignorance (although that can play a part) so much as lack of editor prescience.
Thanks... This makes good sense. Assuming ODP has the resources to list the site I'll be submitting, might it also have the resources to bring the main topical category up to date? What's the best way to request this... as a separate transaction entirely, or as a PS to the submission? I understand that there aren't enough editors to go around, but I'd be remiss if I didn't try to level the playing field.
The ODP is not a yellow pages.
natural - This is what I meant when I said, "Clearly, it's impossible for a directory to provide a lot of granularity...." I would have been shocked, though, if the rest of your post described ODP policy.
If you are offering an actual, unique service -- Something that you perform with your own grubby little hands and rusty little neurons, while you're wide awake -- if, say, you are the only person on earth who is able to send Joe Bob Jones, Jr. (a.k.a. "Buddy"), to fix plumbing problems in Podunk, N.J. -- then a website telling people what kind of problems Buddy can fix without help, and how to contact your dispatcher, and nothing else, may well constitute useful and unique content -- in the Podunk/Business_and_Economy category.
:)
Seems like a good way to tackle ODP is to submit once, wait a few months and then submit one more time. Each time a site is submitted it moves to the back of the category queue so its probably best not to submit once a month as is suggested in various articles around the net. If the first submission gets deleted for whatever reason which can, but isn't supposed to happen (unless the site is not fit to list), a second may be a good idea.
Repeated submissions (say monthly) are generally not a good idea cause it'll most likely just push the site ot the end of the queue each time and result in editors having to delete them all once an appropriate category (or two) is found for the site.
Seems like a good way to tackle ODP is to submit once, wait a few months and then submit one more time.
If you truly think that the proper category is in rough shape, that's something resource zone volunteers may look into.
It may be perfectly appropriate in the case of the type of businss that you're talking about for sites to be listable both in the Topical category and in the appropriate Regional category...
motsa - As I mentioned, the service in this category isn't really portable... It must be performed in the client's home. I can imagine an informational site, or a business site that carries a lot of information, belonging in the topical category under the guidelines we're discussing. Many of the listings I'm citing, though, are purely local. Some paraphrases of examples...
- ODP topical description: "...services in the Podunkville area."
- And on the site: "We repair widgets in your house in Podunkville."
- On another listed site: "I am an independent widget designer specializing in home widget design in MyTown USA."
- And another topical description: "...family business specializing in home widget repair (in the UK).
- On the site: "Visit our showroom. We are at the end of Local Lane near OurHill Shopping Centre on the Smythie Road."
Nothing ambiguous about any of these... They're simply sites that perhaps were, as hutcheson suggests, ahead of their time. They have no general content.
I can see another time warp coming down the road. If the topical categories are cleaned up, these local sites, now in topic specific international areas, will get moved to more general local or regional categories. As the local and regional listings continue to grow, though, these categories will eventually become crowded themselves and will have to be divided into more topic-specific local subcategories.
I know that it may be hard to anticipate exactly what the growth will be, but I'd expect that it will to some degree parallel the growth of the main listings. If new listings were tagged with internal meta data for future subcategorization, then, as the number of regional listings grows, the subcategorization could perhaps happen automatically.
I hope this makes sense. To put it another way, I'm thinking there should be ways to anticipate future growth of the directory, based on the past growth of the directory, so that even if these growth patterns changed, meta data created for the purpose could guide or automate a lot of the process. For all I know, this is being done now. If not, it's an idea that this discussion suggests might be helpful.
If you have the misfortune of aiming at category that doesn't get much attention, and during a monthly renewal of your submission, you don't submit it to EXACTLY the same category.... you could lose you chance to get in all together.
Is that to say that if you submit to two different categories, ODP may decide not to list your site because it was submitted twice?
sure hope that's not the case
Skibum, if, over 12 months, you submit to 12 different categories, it could be a bit of a problem, but not major. If you submit to dozens of different categories over a period of months or years, you'll look like a spammer and probably be trimmed down to 1 or 2 very appropriate listings (assuming you ever got listed before someone noticed the spamming).
Trying for a regional category and a topical one is not spam. Trying dozens of times is.
