Well it’s that time again and it appears the pagerank update is in full swing. A number of older web directories appear to have dropped PR while a number of new directories are getting huge increases. We will have to wait for most likely over week until the PR finishes updating on all datacenters.

A post on Matt Cutts blog is running pretty hot with over 400 comments from Google users and webmasters after Matt posted How to Report Paid Links. This has sparked controversy amongst the webmaster and seo community as paid links are a form of advertising and revenue, and for a lot of websites their only form of monetization.

Granted, paying for links to increase your positions at the search engine giant can and most likely is having an effect on the results displayed to users, but isn’t Google themselves selling links in the form of Adwords? or what about the directory giant Yahoo, will they be penalized for charging a review fee of your site which can lead to a listing in their directory? After all this is what serious directory owners are charging fees for, to review your site for a possible listing, not to just list any site because they have paid the submission fee.

There are valid arguments on both sides of the fence but at the end of the day in my opinion Google can surely come up with a better way of detecting paid links than asking internet surfers to report a site selling links and asking them to do this for free I might add.  Enjoyable read, you make your own deductions.

The latest version of the popular phpLD directory script 3.2.0 was released today and includes some much anticipated improvements and mods. Visit the phpLD forums for a complete listing of changes including template changes.

What is going on at DMOZ with the directory category? Well deserving directories are being listed hand over fist. If this is the new DMOZ moving in a new direction then hats off to the senior staff and all editors, I just hope it continues for a long time to come. Sites being listed in the directories category are of quality and the owners do care about their directory.

If you know of other categories with similar activity let us know.

Pay for placement, bid for position, whatever you wish to call the latest trend of directories that are springing up everywhere one thing is for sure, they are generating revenue. How do they work? Users can list their site in the directory for $1 and the higher the user bids the higher their position or placement in the directory. Take a look at a couple of my favorite paid positioning directories Big Web Links and DollarLinking just to see the revenue potential.

For a list of bid for placement directories you can check this list at the DP Forums.

A pay for position directory script can be found at phpLinkBid and will set you back $24.95 which includes lifetime updates and link removal.