Most of the SEO's I know don't even give PR much thought. More like link brokers jumping off buildings.
Well its what they do, I pay people to spend days logged into linkmanager and linkmarket requesting links. If I enroll a pr zero site I get like 60% the link trades as I would get if I enrolled pr3-4. The higher the pr the more people want to trade links with you, it just the way the world seems to work.
How can it be terrible when most make tons of money with little work. They found a need and filled it. It might not be a forever business but it has seem to work for most of them for a long time now.
Down boy! Just trying to have a little fun. I recommend a little fresh air for any of you that have checked to see if PR is back more than 5 times today ... thats where I'm headed! heh
I, for one, welcome this move. In my humble opinion, Google has realized that one of their core philosophies has been breached: Let's be honest here: with link brokers, directories, etc, that has not been the case. PR is alive and well, it is only displayed for trusted sites. Sites that have been checked by a human and deemed to be something a little special. Which sites are those you ask? http://directory.google.com In my opinion, this isn't a glitch. This is a move back towards integrity. And anyone who has a site listed in DMOZ just moved up the ladder a bit in the category of site value.
I had a site recently added to DMOZ last month. To my knowledge Google hasn't synchronized their own directoy to DMOZ for a long time. Then I did notice that my site which was recently added to DMOZ has been added to Google's directory. I personally hope Google didn't put more weight into DMOZ...
The hardest part appears to me to maintain categories. Some sites get dropped, others change content, some sites like cnn.com constantly move their content. I have clicked on a few cnn.com links within several categories and it seems to me that most of the content has been moved somewhere else and the pages within the DMOZ categories are not relevant to the topic of those categories. But then again, I'm not a DMOZ editor and don't really know if anyone is working on those issues or not ...
I have to agree with Shawn's post (somewhere on Page 19, I think) about Google not dropping toolbar PR as yet. Apart from the fact that they are listing toolbar PR as a toolbar feature, they would lose out quite a bit if they dropped toolbar PR. Toolbar PR was never reliable in any case, but if they stopped displaying it a lot of people (including me) would uninstall the toolbar and perhaps install something else like Alexa (which is not as good imo). It would also be a big hassle for me if they did this. I get a lot of link requests for my directory and photography site and there are a lot of losers out there who say that they want to exchange links with you and end up placing your link on a page that isn't even linked from the main site. So, your link or that page is never cached by Google. But, the page uses the same template as the rest of the site and so there is no quick way of checking if they are trying to rip you off (apart from doing a site: query for that page). Others will set-up a direct link to that page and then delete it as soon as you place their link on your site. So, I had started asking for a PR2 link for my photography site, as this ensures that the person has placed your link on an accessible page. I didn't do it for SEO purposes as the links I placed for their sites were placed on PR4 pages. Anyway, with the toolbar showing zero PR, I will have to do other things to check links: 1. Do a site: query on Google 2. Perhaps do a link: query on Alltheweb 3. Have a really good look at the website On the other hand, if Google are to do this it would affect a lot of businesses like TextLinkBrokers as they sell links based on PR and they might have to start selling them based on Alexa or something else. At the moment, it is "wait and watch" I guess.
I have made a comment on another forum http://www.vbwebmaster.com/forums/showpost.php?p=4696&postcount=34 that I stand behind when it comes to the issue of PR. They are not against seo's, but they are not in the business of pleasing us. They are in business of pleasing the web searchers.