europeforvisitors - 2:30 pm on Nov 14, 2002 (gmt 0)

Obviously once a site gets in the DMOZ, even if it goes bye bye it can stay around indefinitely.

Yep. I've got a long-gone page from my former (rhymes with snout-dot-com) site that's still listed in the ODP, and Google continues to rank it even though it no longer exists and is redirecting to another -----.com page. I've used the update form at least twice over the past year and e-mailed editors higher up in the ODP hierarchy (the category doesn't have an editor), but the page is still there.

Similarly, Google continues to list pages from my wife's old -----.com site more than a year after the site disappeared--again, because of redirects.

I don't know what the solution is. Banning URLs that redirect wouldn't work, because redirects are sometimes legitimate. Maybe Google should just use the ODP as a place to find new URLs for spidering and ignore the ODP's listing once a URL has been indexed. That way, the presence of an ODP listing wouldn't trick Google into thinking that a non-existent site or page was still on the Web.