Crazy Old Google

[Halfdeck]

this will have the effect of raising the PR calc quite substantially

Right. My point is you can get PageRank from virtually anywhere. DMOZ's influence over search results has more to do with it being a great candidate as a seed site when running various algorithms. For example, Hub/authority based algo where DMOZ is used as a seed for generating a set of good authorities and hubs. Or a TrustRank-type algo where DMOZ is used as a seed to generate a list of sites that link out to high quality sites (I'm not claiming those algos are actually in place). Add to that the fact that a listing in DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory are positive quality signals that tell Google my site isn't a 2-week-wonder spam. Fluctuations in PageRank will have an effect, but my bet is the effect would be minor. One way to check is to look at the number of urls you have in Google's main index by running a "site:domain.com/*" command. If number of results hasn't changed dramatically, I'd assume your site's link pop hasn't changed all that much either.