It would be interesting to know if directory owners hold any significance to PR and their directories any more. Do you think PR is important or do you think it doesn't make a blind bit of difference? I'm convinced that PR has an impact on us and agree with the blog here So don't be shy about it, let Google know whether we like it or not.
i think page rank is a factor that cannot be overlooked as mhamdi has said it will affect traffic and submissions. Regardless what each individual owner thinks the end result will be the webmaster submitting to sites first with higher page rank. As most know the inner pages will probably be zero anyhow it's the attraction of that green bar luring people there over those lower rated directories offering similar services. Thats why i say it cannot be overlooked thats only my opinion. But just to add I think overall quality is way more important.
Higher PR is likely to bring more sales. People care about google PR when link building - so if your categories have a better PR they are likely to submit.
I think submitters definitely look at directory PR - the number of submissions to domaining.in dropped after google decided to adjust my pagerank a couple of weeks ago and the people paying for featured spots pretty much disappeared. It doesn't really bother me that my pagerank was adjusted (although I don't understand why it happened) but it certainly has had a negative effect on my business.
as has been said its only important for submitters as submitters eventually learn how pr means a lot less than it did so they will be less interested in submitting to high pr sites and checking other things like quality of content, backlinks, metas for categories etc quicker the better imo im sick of it
Pr is very important to directories. It's the primary reason why people are willing to pay to be included in the site.
I think it will just take folks time to adjust to the fact that now, PR does not mean much. As webmasters and directory owners we are very sensitive to any changes but for the more general web users and part-time webmasters it will take a few more months to get the news out that PR means very little these days because google is manipulating it to serve their own profit adgenda. There was a time around 10 months ago and back that PR was almost everything.
Lets hope so.If google removed PR altogethor from the toolbar, or perhaps lowered PR on EVERY general directory allowing submissions the whole webmaster world may start to rely on other factors. This would benefit all directory owners, but at the moment the "one rule for one guy, another rule for another guy" is pretty annoying.
yea its bs i wouldnt be so fussed about it if all directories were treated the same but they werent there are dirs who definitely bought links and did all the stuff u arent supposed to do and they didnt lose pr
Wouldn't it be true to say PR is worth just as much as it was before any of this penalization nonsense started or am I wrong? Where has Google said they value PR any less?
Depends on the purpose of your directory of course, but as Google has asserted, their view is that the purpose of most paid directories is to pass PR to listed sites, so it matters very little what we think. If Google did not think PR mattered why would they bother penalizing certain sites like paid directories, which they have outright admonished for paid links, which nobody would care about buying unless they wanted to "game" the search algorithms? And anybody who believes that PageRank is not still an essential part of Big G's search algos is just being naive. Without ranking web pages based on "popularity" as measured by the number of links to a given web page, how else are they going to rank pages and offer up decent (although seemingly less and less relevant these days as PR becomes less and less effective) search results? If you know the answer, please enlighten all of us ;-)
In the PR algorithm backlinks are votes and if someone makes a paid submission to a directory for listing in a relevant category and the owner of the directory deems the site worthy of inclusion, why should it not count as a vote?
Slightly off topic whatever program your using to gather your data for accurate PR isn't working properly. It doesn't pick up the correct age of a domain name.
The Site Rank tool uses Wayback Machine (aka Internet Archive). Not sure there is any tool that is completely accurate for domain age ;-)
www.whois.ws is about as accurate as you are going to get. Wayback is a minimum of six months behind by its own admission.
I know you chose B, would you care to elaborate on it please? It's actually not my choice, I'd probably go for D, scrapping it all unless a better model is devised. (I'm working on one method of making PR viable, and as fantasy island as it may sound I'm going to approach Google with it). Apart from getting laughed out of the Gplex what harm can it do.