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...

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!

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