Are these 200+ IBL's still counted? I haven't seen them showing up in MSN and their effect seems much less powerful in Google nowadays. Anyone have verification on this?
Verification, no. But there are hints that Google at least has been working on discounting cloned DMOZ pages for a while now.
I have 1 still hanging in there. I thought it would be gone from the cache by now, but I still have 120.000 pages cached. maybe it's not gone because it is within a Joomla site, and therefore has additional content on the pages.. Not sure..
as Minstrel said, the general feeling is that over the summer (and perhaps predating that) several google algo updates have reduced the value of of links from DMOZ clones to next to nothing good!
Indeed. That's a situation that should never have been allowed to develop into a problem - to my mind, Google's greatest folly. I'm very happy they finally seem to be correcting it. It was antithetical to the principles of PageRank.
That's answer #1. Others include macdesign pagode jimnoble lmocr pretty much every regular at the Resource Zone etc. -- you get the picture (apologies to Jim Rome and The Jungle)
I'm not sure discounting dmoz clones is as easy as it might seem though. It relies on search engines being able to determine that it is indeed a clone, and assumes that they care. Besides, the very fact of an Open Directory link is taken by search engines to be an indicator of a site's quality, which by its nature will permeate to other sites. Even Google itself promotes a Dmoz clone with its own directory, just as it promotes a Wikipedia clone by linking to answers.com with practically every search. Not that I necessarily agree with it, but I just don't think it's a clear cut issue. As to whether the link count reflects this, my opinion is that low quality/blatant scraper sites will be discounted, but again this comes down to how search engines determine it.