Not so much anymore as others have said...plus, we track heavily our inbound traffic and honestly, it's been YEARS since I ever noticed a DMOZ referral for any of our clients...

Might have been a real prize...but not so much anymore, eh!

Could you provide URLs for that?

I also dont' quite follow you - say you're looking for "plumber in Taos" -- do you mean that your site comes up 2nd?
-- if so good!

Do you mean if you're searching for "Bills Plumbing Services" (your company name) and that comes up second?

• if so, then what comes up first?

course...maybe the real question is - why would you want to detune to free??

Exact same thing has happened to us in the past too....

One of our clients is a major Canuck city's Economic Development dept whose mandate is to get new businesses and investors to come to their city to invest and open new businesses. At first, we too were denied access to anything - we had to create long Word .docs with full directions and screenshots of what to do and where to do it. However, after 5 renewals over the past 5 years, we were given full access to their site via both their CMS and ftp too...

Proving I'd suspect that trust needs to be "earned" - not given freely is how I'd see it...

Oh in another case another SEO client - a major Canuck University has not been able to give that same earned trust access as their site includes credit card info - buried deep and encrypted - but PCI specs say that they should limit access....so again we do the full Word .doc blueprints for their site....

re: directories....um...when I now think of same I use "citations" instead....and here's a great link to whitesparks list of the best citation URLs in the US and other countries too....http://www.whitespark.ca/top-local-citation-sources-by-country as well as I've blogged about this again just today too here....www.canuckseo.com !

I'd check over on Alan Bleiweiss's site...IMHO he's the best audit guy out there and if memory serves, he's got a checklist of some type there too...including a detailed post on same....

Agreed here on Monica's answer directly above....this is what should be done, eh!

Far as I know - no value at all for serps....but for searchers perhaps...depends on whether it might be a transactional query or a instructional one etc etc....

Need more data to help, eh!

Will not hurt at all...other than let the reader know the date you published same...first date that is, not a subsequent update date....fyi...

course...maybe the real question is - why would you want to detune to free??

Agreed here on Monica's answer directly above....this is what should be done, eh!

What Egol said is quite true...this has been debated for years....but those of us who don't care about the validations rank our own or our clients sites quite nicely.

Oh sidebar - you'd be so surprised to learn what kind of HUGE well known sites won't validate either....

well...then again (this is the programmer in me speaking!) you could always "force" submission compliance by building in scripting to ensure that ALL those items are completed by the submitter themselves - else the SUBMIT button remains grayed out....

would work. have built them myself. you could eLance or oDesk it too....

Hmm...never seen this exactly before - but a few years back we discovered for a client that their reality tv series show (Deadliest Catch) member site had been severely infected by Canadian Pharma phony sites....

Seems the hacker had 'broken' in via a MS update that was not done on their hosting platform site - and it took the tv company almost 4 months to disavow, rebuild and then index and begin to rank again as I remember....i.e. this was NOT a WP issue but a hosting server hack...

But with 20+ pages of Uggs and Nude Men rolling Christians (love that one, eh!) infections, you need to get that totally fixed asap so I'd start with querying the hosting vendor logs...

How comes to mind...if you can not determine where the hack came from - you could kill the subdomain after saving all your articles - recreate it say as "info.mshowells.com" or "advice.mshowells.com" or "counsel.mshowells.com" and reload in the same artices....have had to do that too for another client....

Whitespark....Darren's got Nyag there and he can build with the best of them!!!

As usual, Egol perfectly answered...but thought I'd just add....

That just a year ago, I did file a DMCA and eventually wound up (honest!) talking to someone from Homeland Security in the US as the firm I was after apparently was being "watched!" While I do believe we're all being watched, that experience did worry me a bit...

My content was taken down - but by the .gov of the firm in which the owners of same lived - least that's the answer I got...if you can trust that anything you hear from the ones in charge is believeable.... <knocks on="" desk="">testing testing...you guys still listening in???

:-)</knocks>

I'd check over on Alan Bleiweiss's site...IMHO he's the best audit guy out there and if memory serves, he's got a checklist of some type there too...including a detailed post on same....

re: directories....um...when I now think of same I use "citations" instead....and here's a great link to whitesparks list of the best citation URLs in the US and other countries too....http://www.whitespark.ca/top-local-citation-sources-by-country as well as I've blogged about this again just today too here....www.canuckseo.com !

Yup...the content is not hidden from the googlebot...so it's still read, indexed and used....

But as Sheena noted, that's "old school" design thinking, eh!