rfgdxm1 - 9:46 pm on Mar 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

>Rankings shouldn't depend on these people, to any extent.

And yet if you can get your teenage nephew to add a link to your site on his home page, that should count, while ODP links are ignored? That makes no sense. The flaw in your logic is you greatly exaggerate the relevance of ODP links in Google rankings. Truth is that often a link on your nephew's home page will be more valuable to an ODP link for Google rankings. Most ODP categories (particularly commercial ones, which is what most reading here care about) typically have low PR, and lots of links on the page to dilute PR transferred. While with your nephew his home page has few links. And let's not mention you can get your nephew to link with the exact keyword laden anchor text of your choice, while the ODP will use the official name of your site.