PR up; DMOZ, Yahoo and Serps

Just a theory but who knows

[taxpod]

It has been discussed that in order for the Google algo to work, there have to be some assumptions. These basically consist of the granting of high PR to Yahoo, DMOZ and the like. And this seems to make sense because these sites involve some sort of "expert" evaluation of sites. And it ain't a bad entry point.

But in any given subject area there are some sites (maybe even only one or none sometimes) which are the authoritative source(s) for the topic. If Google were to spend some energy finding sites whose judgement about to whom they link might be a tad better than Yahoo or DMOZ, the PR and thereby the serps would become even more relevant.

The reason I am theorizing in this manner is that I, like all of you, watch the serps in my subject pretty closely. The past many days have seen a lot of gyrations in the serps and many sites have increased PR. I've looked pretty closely at the highest PR sites in my area and the ones at the top who were boosted to 8s are the sites which I would call the authoritative sources for the subject. My site moved up a notch but others around me in the serps did not. I am linked pretty well from many of the sites which increased to 8s in the past few days. So I'm wondering if some of these have been granted "authoritative source" designation by Google and therefore given PR points.

Understand that it's just a theory but Yahoo is hardly that good in my subject and DMOZ isn't really particularly discerning. So I'm curious to hear what others have to say about this.

[vitaplease]

taxpod,

I think Google just did a new normalisation of the Pagerank scale.
We had the same on the downside see also: [webmasterworld.com...]

as we had now (last thursday) on the upside.

Macromedia.com
Usatoday.com
Apache.org
Netscape.com
Microsoft.com
W3.org

now all show up as PR10 on my toolbar.