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Site-A has been online for several years as a wholesale widget site and has a fairly established wholesale trade. It's got a very nice ODP listing; however, it's in what would be considered a retail category, which makes sense since though it says wholesale it doesn't appear to be so, since there's no sign-in or ordering requirement like wholesale sites often have.
That's no problem in itself since the cat is a perfect fit for the product line. The problem is that it was decided months ago (long before I came along) to put up a retail site in addition.
Site-B went up end of last year, intended to be the retail site, but unfortunately it's an identical mirror duplicate of the first (except for the background color); in fact the ordering on the sites, which most of the product links are, all go into the same shopping cart - plainly identified as Site-B. Both sites do, including the first, Site-A.
Two choices:
Change design and separate them including the shopping cart, make Site-A the retail site because of already having an ODP listing in the correct category for a retail site and develop Site-B as the wholesale, which would involve inconvenience for the existing customer base. Site-A would be easier to work with, mainly because of the domain name, would also be easier to get rankings for, since it already has some links and PR.
Choice two is to change design and separate them completely, leave Site-A as the established wholesale site, ask that it be moved, that the category be changed over to the appropriate one in the wholesale portion (which is under Business, not Shopping) and after the changes are made, submit the new retail site, which would be Site-B, to the retail category the current one is now listed in.
I've warned them not to get NEAR ODP with that second site, it could easily get the first one removed if an editor catches it - I'd bounce it myself if anyone tried to submit a second site like that. Frankly, as is one is nothing more than a doorway site to the other - different pricing, but same shopping cart and all. Not a deliberate trick, they just didn't know better.
Question: can a company, if legitimately identifiable as being the same company, have two listings for two sites, one retail and one wholesale, if it's legit?
Question 2: maybe more important. To avoid confusion with the customer base, if it's possible to have the 2, would it ever be possible to have the current wholesale site that's in a retail category moved over to the corresponding wholesale category and later on, when the retail is re-developed, submit to the appropriate retail category?
Can one company have both a retail and a wholesale listing in different appropriate categories if they sell both retail and wholesale and legitimately have two separate and different sites, or does it need to just one for both?
SN
But: You're right that two mirror websites will ... raise unnecessary suspicions for the editor. If it is very clear from the two home pages that (1) they are the same company (that is, you cross-link them with a note like "we do retail also, see our catalog at xxx.com"), and (2) each site is focused on a different kind of "sufficiently unrelated" sale, then we might give two listings.
Even if we give two listings, we'd rather if possible list the same URL for both. It avoids raising confusing issues about mirrors, etc. And if the navigation is clear enough from one to the other (which for non-deceptive, non-brain-damaged webmasters it will be), that wouldn't be a problem for your customers either.
This is not saying that under no circumstances would we list two different URLs. I expect an "xxx.com" and a "retail.xxx.com" domain would not raise very many questions...but we would still ask ourselves if "xxx.com" couldn't serve for both listings.
