I would wait for another 10 days, but this is probably the reason why G's update was late this month. I would think of what Matt Cutts said about "paid links" being devalued for a possible reason behind. We usually know what's up little by little after the update. So, at this point it is hard for us to know what sort of links are not passing PR.
This is very interesting to me as I am trying to figure out how to get listed high in google search engines. And I dont have the cash to pay for the high cost search words.
Well trying to get directories out off the way would definatly make google adwords or pay per click more valuable thats for sure.
Yes, I think there will be one more PR export in 2 weeks or earlier than that with the snapshot of April 26th.
Interesting thread -- I'd noticed the general drop in directory PR, there certainly looks like a PR6 glass ceiling is growing over the heads of most directory owners with one or two exceptions. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd suggest that G has it in for directories, but I've seen drops on established sites in other niches as well. All this suggests to me that the algo favours newer sites over older ones and that continual growth is the only way to not only grow PR, but also to maintain it. Just my speculation
"algo favours newer sites over older ones" - There might be something to that. I think that G is experimenting with some new types of penalties and maybe new sites are exempt for now as they not good for testing purposes.
Rtchar is right, it's due to the increasing numbers of listed sites. Toolbar green is getting harder to obtain, and that has always been the trend. I have a theory that a lot of this PR is wasted, and that directory owners are in one of the best positions to do something about this. When a site dies, it can often take years for it to drop out of the index, because a lot of webmasters don't check for dead links very often. Individually, the PR of these dead sites is insignificant. But when you consider them as a % of the whole Google index, it's probably growing. They don't need PR, so now is as good a time as any to check for and remove dead links.
Penalities certainly seem to play a big part on older sites ... I have a number of clean new PR3 sites with few in-bound / out-bound links & an older PR3 site with many inbound links (perhaps 200 times as many as the new sites including some PR5 links) and more (but not excessive) outbound links (perhaps 10-12). Add to this high traffic through the older site from a #1 SERPs positioning and low traffic through the new ones: these sites are far from equals, but the PR on them is the same. New sites PR seems to be pretty much a consequence of the highest PR of sites that link to it -- 1 PR4 link gives the linked to site PR3.
If are you talking about outbound links, my MySpace Directory has many outbound links and giving Sitewides to many of e'm still i managed to go up 1 rank from PR 4 to PR 5 tell me if i am wrong!!!
Well, I don't know what it is, but something is up with respect to PR calculations. Perhaps it's something simple, like a sliding reducing scale for PR transfer as the number of outbound links increases -- as opposed to a simple division of PR over the number of outbound links. Various types of subtle changes like this could have dampening effects on various types of sites and activities... in support of Google's view of PR and linking.
I think it is getting harder to get the PRs now a day. Todays PR5 site is tomorrows PR4 sites and so on. How do you remove the dead link. I site may go down for few days eg hosting problem. What happens if you are checking for dead link at this time. You may be removing someone link for no reasons.
I'm not just talking about 404s, and obviously you would want to check a link over a period of time before removing it for that reason. But actually a lot of sites that die just leave messages such as "sorry, we are gone", or redirect to a parked page. Check out this, it's a tool for spidering your links and checking them for parked pages: http://www.glrsales.com/quality-directory.html Unfortunately it's still in development, and you can only test out one url at a time, as yet. But I've had a go testing it with 500 urls (I emailed the developer), and it's looking very effective.
And also http://directory.v7n.com is PR6 I think Google has been out there to catch us Since if about 100 directories like Alive/Aviva/V7n come to the directory market A listing in each of the directory will pass about PR6 to a site so a site can easily gain PR within a few months Gaining PR 6 in 3 months -> Bad results in Google Serps Bad results in Google Serps->Loss of Revenue to Google So only Google dropped the PR
bovad.com fell from pr4 to pr1 I think I'm going broke now well it looks like google's starting to pick up on directories
Hey Mike, i loved your directory by the fresh loook it has, and i hope you do better in the next update, just dont forget to stick with promotion and yeah dont worry this was the Worst PR update and the most surprising as well so dont take it on heart!!! The future is still ahead!
personally I think they just tweaked the PR algo a little bit. I see many sites that lost pr, also many of them that are not involved in directory submissions. Previous pr update we were complaining that it was soo easy these days to get pr5. Well, now it's a little bit more difficult again
I don’t think the ranking drop is specific to directories. It appears more to be internet wide due to Google’s new algorithms. It’s certainly nothing to be alarmed about at all for directory owners. The average page rank for an established directory before Google implemented such importance on back links was PR5 and PR6 for the very best with massive quality content.
Not at all. I'm seeing an average PR drop of 1 point for all my sites, in whatever category, whilst traffic remains stable.