DMOZ - difference in cats and body of search..

[Chalupee]

I'm sure someone has asked this before..
for example.. on dmoz's main or "home" page.. www.dmoz.org
you would enter San Diego California the result on the top
of the page are the "cats" and then below the "body" of links.
For San Diego California there are 1000+ links in the "body."

My question is.. what is the relevance to search engines that use
DMOZ (google, altavista, etc) to the positioning of a link in
the "body" ... is number 5 the same as 25? Or would
number 5 be given more "weight" or better position in google or
altavista because of the placement of the link "body" position?

Thanks group!
Chalupee is not from Gaudahloopee

[John_Caius]

The dmoz search is entirely independent of Google or any other search engine and is primarily for the purpose of enabling an editor to find the best cat for a site - hence the cats coming at the top.

Very few non-editors use the dmoz search - I wouldn't give any thought to where your site comes up in its results.

[vitaplease]

Chalupee,

I had the same question here:

[webmasterworld.com...]

I don't think a conclusive answer has been posted yet.

[hutcheson]

Sorry, but I don't see any respect in which John Caius's answer falls short of any reasonable definition of "definitive."

There is NO connection between the ODP search result ordering and ANY conceivable system of page ranking -- including (perhaps generously) all the major search engines.

And there's very very little connection between ODP search result ordering (which can't usefully be called "positioning") and traffic to a site. This connection, small as it may normally be, is even smaller in highly commercialized topics (i.e. those that affect affiliate site swarms and SERP perps).

But isn't that what you understood John to be saying?

[steveb]

I'll try...

"My question is.. what is the relevance to search engines that use DMOZ (google, altavista, etc) to the positioning of a link in the 'body'..."

None.

[rfgdxm1]

>Very few non-editors use the dmoz search - I wouldn't give any thought to where your site comes up in its results.

I'm not so sure about that. However, anyone directly using dmoz.org should know that the idea is to find the cat you are looking for with the search. If you want the best match of sites to a search query, then you should be using Google, not the ODP. The only advantage to a directory is that it can give a lot of related sites without the false hits search engines give.