New ODP policy may have an impact on PR

ODP disallowing robots on editors and bookmarks pages

[stigj]

Hello All!
I have been reading for some time. It's a great place to spent (too much) time.

Top ODP editor's profile-pages typical have a PR of 8. By linking to categories low in the hierarchy the normal decay in PR have been surpassed with some rather strange results:

Top: Regional: North America: United States: Texas: Localities: L: Lubbock (PR 7)
Top: Regional: North America: United States: Texas: Localities: A: Austin (PR 5)

It seems that ODP have changed policy:
http://www.resource-zone.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=announce&Number=5835&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=0&fpart=

Have I got it wrong? Or can we expect to see some changes in PR in future updates?

Regards Stig

[hurlimann]

Yes they have disallowed crawling of bookmarks and editor profiles. This will effect some sites PR.

[richlowe]

They have used "allow:" in their robots.txt file, which I do not remember as being valid. Unless I missed something?

[dmoz.org...]

Richard Lowe

[EliteWeb]

heh i never thought about that, guess i always just had my sites in dmoz i havnt had to put nething in my bookmarks, but if it were higher ranking then i was missing out ;)

[crash]

Well, according to SearchEngineWorld [searchengineworld.com] ;)

"Extensions to the Standard
Although there have been proposed standards extetions such as an Allow line or robot version control, there has been no formal endorsement by the Robots exclusion standard working group."

Sooo, unless this page needs to be updated.. it's not valid code and those pages won't be *allowed* - unless of course Google has decided to honor it.

[vitaplease]

stigj,

I have been wondering [webmasterworld.com]for a while why Google did not disregard these rather generous Pagerank gifts earlier. Not that volunteer editors do not deserve some kind of compensation, but a PR7 homerun might be overdoing it.

If what you say is true then DMOZ/ODP will have taken the situation in hand themeselves.

Just imagine if DMOZ/ODP would change all the straight (link) listings links to javascript links..that would cool down the url-submission numbers..

(this just happened to the Dutch volunteer equivalent of DMOZ/ODP in the Netherlands; startpagina.nl, (2714 Dutch category pages with each approx 100 plus urls) the site is the page most frequently used as start-up (home)page within personal browsers in Holland).

[ciml]

I see your point, vitaplease, but Google don't seem to hand tweak their results much for individual cases.

They assign and remove penalties by hand for know spam, so the 'can have PR but not pass it on' penalty could be given to 'bookmark' URLs I suppose (as happened with 'guestbook' a few months ago).

If the ODP Web site decides that an editor should be linked from a high level category X, and that editor decides to link to low level sub-categoryY then I don't see why PageRank shouldn't flow.

This is what makes PR different from old fashioned link popularity; important pages get more votes.