Deano’s answer to: “Why does Open Site Explorer count DMOZ links so high in its page authority?”

A few reasons DMOZ carries a lot of Authority Weight:

• There are lots of sites that link to DMOZ, raising its own native PR/authority
• DMOZ is entirely human-curated, and getting past the site editors to gain placement in a relevant category is exceedingly difficult these days – this prevents a lot of bad/spammy links showing up in the directory
• As Glenn Friesen mentioned, there are several other directories that scrape/reuse DMOZ data, so getting a DMOZ link will, over time, cause additional automatic backlinks to appear without further effort
• DMOZ will turn 13 years old on June 5th, 2011. The domain age of DMOZ also increases its authority, and the authority of sites it links to in its directory
• Google and other search engines recognize DMOZ's unique place in web history, and weigh sites that show up in the directory differently than normal site backlinks

Why does Open Site Explorer count DMOZ links so high in its page authority?