Ranked #1 with PR5 but not in Dmoz?

How can this be?

[salmo]

I have a site (not the one in my profile) that was launched recently to sell web hosting. Although the site is not listed in Dmoz, it has come into Google at #1 for at least one of our keyword phrases and with a page rank of 5 in the latest update. All my past experience has taught me that an ODP listing is pretty much a minimum requirement for listing in Google and yet this seems to be in conflict with that.

Any ideas?

[Fiver]

ODP is not a minimum requirement at all. I'd say most of Google index has never garnered a link from anywhere within DMOZ.

DMOZ simply provides good sites with a link from a high quality (and high page-rank) source. Google sees this as a boost, and you will then have an easier time achieving rankings.

I, and many others here, have quite a few pr5 sites that don't live in dmoz. pr 6 is significantly easier to attain with a dmoz listing, if your category has a pr of 7.

[djgreg]

An ODP listing is not necessarily required for ranking NR1 in Google for a certain term. If you have many backlinks from other page, then you can easily rank before a site with dmoz entry.

[salmo]

Of the 18 incoming links, 16 are internal links only two are from another site (PR6). As a matter of fact one of the links from the PR6 site is a graphic link and the other is from a page that has been been excluded in a robots.txt file which Google has evidently ignored in this case.

[egomaniac]

I agree. Some people here at WebmasterWorld believe that ODP links carry more weight in Google than other links do. I think that belief is mistaken. My personal belief is that Google treats all links from all pages equally. What matters is what the real PageRank is of the page giving the link, how many links are on that page, and what text is in the link text on the page giving the link.

[Fiver]

My personal belief is that Google treats all links from all pages equally

Google themselves have said this. I'm far too lazy to find the quote. apologies.

pr is not the only value of a link of course, I'm a believer in theme relevance.

[europeforvisitors]

Two of my four index.htm pages have DMOZ listings. Two don't. All have a PR of 6.

For editorial content sites, DMOZ listings may be overrated--especially if they fit on DMOZ category pages that have modest PageRank or that distribute their PR contributions over many listings.

For e-commerce sites, a DMOZ listing may be (or could become) important if Google uses DMOZ listings to help differentiate between legitimate sites and spam sites. Some people think that's already happening. I'm a bit skeptical, because it seems unlikely that Google would outsource such an important decision to a third-party organization (especially one that's staffed by thousands of volunteers). If Google *is* using DMOZ listings for quality control, a DMOZ listing is probably just one factor in differentiating between high- and low-quality sites.

[mayor]

I have a three month old site that has PR5. No DMOZ listings but about ten links from relevant PR5 and PR6 sites.

I'm finding that it's much easier to get links via link swaps from well-ranked relavant sites than to get a link from DMOZ.

Not only that, but I'm getting good targeted traffic from those other sites.

DMOZ is hit or miss and can take months. Then, the traffic you get will be after nothing more than all that free content you had to put up to bait DMOZ to list your site.