[Anonymous]

It's almost a fad these days to say "for Google an ODP link has no more value than any other link on a page with the same PR" (rfgdxm1).
Although mis-information abounds on the Internet, I'd like to address this one.
Take a look at this statement:
for Google an ODP link has no more value than any other link on a page with the same PR

http://dmoz.org/Business/Construction_and_Maintenance/Materials_and_Supplies/Concrete/

http://www.goguides.org/wrc.html

Both these pages have the same PageRank. (PR5)

for Google an ODP link has no more value

So, should I acquire a link for Concrete-Home.com on the DMOZ category page? Or the GoGuides Webmaster Resources page?

Common sense tells you the correct answer, and the reasons are:
Themed Link Context
The ODP is a web directory, and by it's very nature it is themed correctly. Concrete-Home.com is a concrete-related website, so it helps to be surrounded by related sites.

358 Sites
The ODP lists 358 sites using ODP data. The majority of those are not using the full directory structure. Most simply use parts of the directory that are related to the topics that site deals with. And several important portals are using the ODP data. Included among them are Google, Netscape, AOL, Ask Jeeves, and several other very important sites. This one link, which is supposedly of no more value than a link from any other page with PR5, goes off via DRF dump and has a lot of little baby links. :D

PR5
Not all PR5 pages are the same. A DMOZ PR5 pages gets crawled more often than the index page of Concrete-Home.com, which also has PR5. A link added to Concrete-Home.com index page was indexed in about two months, whereas our listings in DMOZ have usually been indexed in a month or less.

DMOZ isn't the end-all be-all of link acquisition, but it does help you get noticed. 8)

[webyourbusiness]

John,

I have to agree with you 100% here - the DMOZ.org listing helps to the extent that ANY equally ranked page linking to you will help - but you have to consider the base pagerank of the site as well - look at the pagerank of the page you will be listed under, and also the pagerank of the home-page of the site. Any pagerank 7 or higher SITE is going to be indexed at least weekly (in our experience) - possibly more often (we think it's daily for PR=10) - this means that you get your spin-off scans by the googlebot much quicker, and probably more frequently than with a lower ranked site.

We've been doing this for 5 years - our experience is that a dmoz.org listing helps a great deal - does it help much more than another pagerank = 10 site?

Your guess is as good as mine ... there aren't that many PR=10 sites linking to us! :wink:

regards

Greg Hewitt-Long

[Anonymous]

but you have to consider the base pagerank of the site as well

I think that right there is what a lot of people are missing. The DMOZ index page has PR10, so, as you say, it'll be crawled more often that a site with a base PR of 5, or 7, or whatever. This is why you cannot treat a link from a DMOZ page with PR5 the same way you'd treat a link from another page with the same PR5. 8)

[ian]

I have heard professionals say that a link from dmoz is of no more value than an inbound link from a site with an equivalent pagerank, and this statement is completely misleading for the reasons that John pointed out.
My experience is that dmoz helps a lot!