roma1625 - 3:25 pm on Jun 29, 2008 (gmt 0)

Webwork,

Thanks for your opinion on Pagerank, but you really don't address my question, which is how directories achieve high Pageranks.

"In the context of what you are seeing the (toolbar) Pagerank pretty much shows itself to mean nothing" - I don't know why you think this. Why is this context any different from any other context?

Quote directly from Google:

"PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results."

So those directories with high Pageranks are, by definition, important pages to Google. Their backlink profiles are apparently acceptable to Google, otherwise Google wouldn't rank them so highly.