Google has significantly changed how the allocate PR to sites and pages, pages considered not to be of quality or whose contents are not too funky are PR0.

eSyndicat and other site that gets most of their PR from directories are particularly being hot PRwise recently.

Millions of backlinks through sitewide footers is not seen as a good thing for PR benefit. ALL footer links will soon be useless.

I and a couple of other people including Danny Sullivan, Jill Whalen, Mike Greghan & Ammon Johns, spoke to Matt Cutts about 3 years ago in London SES, and we all agreed that links in small text at the foot of a page are pretty much worthless spam, UNLESS they are internal links when they become very important as they are a site map!

read into that what you will

Originally Posted by OldWelshGuy

Millions of backlinks through sitewide footers is not seen as a good thing for PR benefit. ALL footer links will soon be useless.

I and a couple of other people including Danny Sullivan, Jill Whalen, Mike Greghan & Ammon Johns, spoke to Matt Cutts about 3 years ago in London SES, and we all agreed that links in small text at the foot of a page are pretty much worthless spam, UNLESS they are internal links when they become very important as they are a site map!

read into that what you will

A point worth to be noted! forums are great place, sometimes you get solid advice for free!

Originally Posted by temi

Google has significantly changed how the allocate PR to sites and pages, pages considered not to be of quality or whose contents are not too funky are PR0.

eSyndicat and other site that gets most of their PR from directories are particularly being hot PRwise recently.

I agree 100% with temi that Google is now recognizing individual pages and even links ( to go to the extreme) when they are assigning PR.

I have a PR4 directory on phpLD. It had its latest/top hits pages PR3. But now all those pages have PR N/A. All happened during last few days.

So its not a PR Crash as you put-- but rather a PR re-adjustment and new algo.

Sometimes when PR is updating you will see a 0 for a month or so, this used to happen a few years ago, so I don't know if it still applies.

Originally Posted by experienceadvertising

Sometimes when PR is updating you will see a 0 for a month or so, this used to happen a few years ago, so I don't know if it still applies.

I think that you may be partially right but there are many other circumstances for PR drops

One big KILLER is when you are either having server DC broadcasting problems or if you switch your server or host entirely.

I can not say 100% if directories are dangerous for passing PR but I can tell you that they are still one of the best for term positioning and to me that is the most important thing there is.

I don't really want to think that directories are ALL bad because i can almost prove that they are not. I think it is the way that each individual directory owner promotes his site personally.