Larryhat - 9:20 pm on May 10, 2004 (gmt 0)

" The people who copied DMOZ in 2001 and haven't updated are giving PR to a bunch of dead domains. "

Oh is that ever true! I was trailing a non-commercial site, put up by a group that disbanded years ago. Their domain lapsed, got snatched and is hosted with a dummy zero content page. Many incoming links are from old DMOZ listings. Its a little better now.

Question 1: Aren't webmasters (if that's the proper term) who fail to update their DMOZ-cloned listings hurting their own rankings for all the dead links?
I would think that would happen automatically.

Doesn't G "penalize" or at least downgrade sites with lots of dead links? Such sites are clearly unmaintained to say the least.

Question 2: Can't Google easily spot snatched domains, especially when they are propped up with zero
content (parked) pages? If I were G, I would send those to the boondocks in favor of the content and relevance they so highly recommend.

- Larry