John_Caius - 11:12 pm on Mar 31, 2003 (gmt 0)

Right, so it's not the ODP link itself that causes it to rank well, but it's a marker of being an established and quality site. Of course, many sites use the ODP (or Google Directory) as the first-stop resource to building up their links to quality sources of information. So the ODP link is both directly and indirectly gaining you inbound links.