Hi there, has anyone seen any actual info from Mat Cutts about this, or official data. I've been told this a few times, but can’t find the actual comments from matt cuts. It sounds like they're phasing out directories though, or at least hope to, and I’m a little worried since part of my website has a hand made hand edited directory on it, I’m wondering if I'll be affected. All of the out bound links are related to my niche, I’m just wondering what is considered a directory to Google.
i knew they dropped PR heavily for paid directories and non paid as well, this a a couple of months back....
I don't think you need to be worried about a directory on your own website. Google isn't smart enough to automatically detect every directory and apply penalties. They seem to have dropped the PR from obvious link exchange pages. This doesn't seem to affect the indexing/ranking of the rest of the site though.
I don't think you'll have to worry if your outlinks are thematic and could be considered useful to a user. I wouldn't go advertising "buy links" or "link exchange" or "link swap" on there though...