Hub Linking - How important is it?

[Whitey]

Is "Hub linking" still important to the success of a "page" , or have the recent changes that Google has been applying been selective on different web site types?

I've seen a major shift in how Google considers links in directories with a reduction of visible PR, at least in some of the directories we subscribe to. PR may have some influence also on TR.

IMO Hub Score was easy to detect and invalidate if the links were irrelevant to the theme of the page, and easy to score upwards where a direct quality relationship occurred.

At this stage, I haven't worked out if the inbound link strength to our sites from directories has effected rankings, but I'm not just talking about directories.

In the past some folks might add a number of outgoing links to high quality and well known pages to increase the hub score of the page . The most wide-spread method for creating a massive number of outgoing links is to be found on directories. Some are more authoratitve than others, and some of course are human edited, suggesting care and effort has gone into the quality control, hence providing a validation for the search engines.

[martinibuster]

I think one can over analyze these things. I liberally link out to sites if it makes sense in the context of what I'm presenting to my user, that is, if it's useful to the user in the context. Otherwise I won't link out.

I don't think about a hub score. What you link to, imo, has something to say about what that page is relevant for. That's why sometimes sites that link out to another site start ranking for the name of the product or site they're linking to.