DMOZ's Worth? Let The Search Engines Decide

There has been much talk about the current state of DMOZ.org (The Open Directory Project) and whether or not webmasters should bother submitting sites to it. DMOZ was launched nearly 9 years ago by a couple of engineers from Sun Microsystems who eventually sold it to Netscape as its popularity began to grow. Even though it was a free submission, it carried so much weight as an incoming link for websites that webmasters included it in their "must-have" list along with paid listings at Yahoo!, Business.com and bCentral. DMOZ data was even used to populate the Google Directory.

Fast forward to October 2006: The site suffered a major system failure and was down for several weeks. It was not unusual for the website to experience intermittent downtime and slow periods on a regular basis, but this was a major issue as much of the internal data had been lost. DMOZ is back up now, but with the instability and excruciating wait times with submissions, many people are asking if it's still worth it to submit to.

Well, let's let the search engines decide. As soon as the search engines devalue an incoming link from your DMOZ listing, then your question is answered. But consider this: would Google, who is the trailblazer for stomping out sp@m in search rankings, want to devalue such listings that have been around for say, six years, and are quality, legitimate websites? Anyone who knows the Google algorithm knows that the age of a domain plays a huge part in high rankings. This same principal is also assigned to the age of incoming links a site receives. I personally don't think Google is going to penalize old, high quality sites by throwing away the value of their DMOZ listing.