I've noticed that latest MSN algorithms score links from Dmoz very high, but they don't score links from Wikipedia high at all. It seems that all search engines nowadays underestimate links from Wikipedia.
I've found that the volume of traffic that MSN delivers to my site makes research useless. I rank extremely well with them, but not enough people use it to make much of a difference to my site. They might contribute $10 in ad revenue, not much more.
How can you determine which links are valued higher than others? There are too many variables. If I was a search engine I would rank both DMOZ and wikipedia as one of the most trusted sources. Wikipedia is almost impossible to get a long term link on so any link that lasts has to be trusted by MSN and any other search engine.
One site of mine have several links from Wikipedia and one from Dmoz. The page which have link from Dmoz ranks high on MSN and other pages don't. I don't have much other links (less than 20) so I assumed that MSN started to score links from DMOZ as very valuable but influence of Wikipedia links is mediocre.
Hm, it depends how competetive are your keywords. I did one experiment in which I was ranked 1-100 in Google for queries like "keyword1 keyword2". But it hasn't generate me traffic at all. Probably because no one searched for those keywords.
It seems to be logical that DMOZ links help more because many websites (including Google Directory) publish DMOZ links.
MSN change thier algo a few weeks back....seems that most of my site han been dropping from their SERP
yes even i could see the positive change... sorry for you jimmy... but msn act in very strange manner at times... but i m happy (till the time i m getting good visibility on MSN...) BTW m on google too...