DMOZ and Google

Is category name used for assessing relevance?

[quaxo]

Here's a (probably very naive) question about the relation between category names and relevance.

Does anyone know if Google PageRank algorithm takes into account the ODP name of the category as a keyword to increment keyword-relevance of the listed URLs? How does the PR algorithm apply to the Google Directory?

As far as I know, the most important parameter used by Google to evaluate keyword-related relevance is the anchor text of inbound links.

If site A links to site B with the following text under an <a> tag: "philosophical underwear can be found here", site B will have its keyword related-relevance increased relatively to "philosophical" and "underwear".

Now, if site A is ODP, the anchor text of the inbound link pointing to B will probably be B's title , so it seems that in no way topic information is conveyed by simple links in the ODP.

Now, what happens if site B, selling philosophical underwear, happens to be listed in a category dealing with issues such as Society/Politics/Revolution (because of the undeniable importance of selling philosophical underwear to promote revolutionary initiatives bla bla bla...)?

Will this affect its keyword-related relevance relatively to "revolution" even if the word doesn't appear in the anchor text of the link?

Thanks guys for shedding some light

quaxo

[rfgdxm1]

Google definitely isn't going to publicly give out the ingredients to the secret sauce. However, from analyzing some SERPs where if a site got a boost from the ODP category name I'd expect to see it, I'm not noticing any evidence of this. As such, my belief is that that the name of the ODP category a site is listed in has no effect on how high a site comes up on Google SERPs.