Google's treament of this directory site baffles me!

[dickbaker]

I came across a directory that is 100% devoted to an extremely competitive niche. No listings that aren't niche-related at all.

The site ranks #8 on Google for the very competitive phrase "widget agents."

The directory charges for a listing, or offers a free listing in exchange for a reciprocal.

Before exchanging links, I checked to see if the site's name showed up in a Google search. It did. I did a whois search, and found that the site has been around for three years. So far, so good.

I did a site: search on Google, and it showed roughly 600 pages. I did a link: search on Google, and it showed about 700 incoming links.

Then I went to Yahoo. A site: search on Yahoo shows about 7,000 pages for the site, and a link: search shows nearly 14,000 incoming links.

As if that wasn't baffling enough, I decided to check the site's PR. Every PR checker I used showed a Google PR of 0!

I thought perhaps the site wasn't a directory back in 2004, so I checked a wayback machine. Nope. It's been a directory all the time.

What's with this? Any ideas?

[tedster]

The first factor to note is that Google's link: operator results are not complete - they intentionally report only a sampling of all the links they see.
Reference: Google link: operator FAQ - it's not like other search engines [webmasterworld.com]

A second factor is that the PR shown on the toolbar is not neceesarily related to Google's "real" PR values that they use behind the scenes. Good discussions about both the link: operator and PageRank are available in our Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.

It sounds like the publicly reported values for this directory site may have been caught up in the recent PageRank Update [webmasterworld.com] and all of Google's activity to try to stop website's from selling links for the purpose of helping PageRank.