So much transpired in the area of PageRank Fraud that many directories were either blamed for it, involved in it, or a victim of being associated with the fraudsters. Here was an interesting case:

David wrote: I ran across a pretty funny example. I think this site (Archive.org Copy) likely paid some big money for high pagerank links from an SEO firm. They have a pagerank 6 site as a result of blog commenting on high PR do follow blogs, yet they don’t rank for Toilet Paper Coupons.

And this is why in a year or two you are going to be glad you ran a quality directory, because this crap doesn’t work!

And here is a spreadsheet showing you the so called “white hat high PR links” that people are trying to sell at the time (circa 2013)
https://docs.google.com/a/david-duva…SWVJfOUE#gid=0

montytx replied: While I agree with you about being careful, looking at the toilet paper example, the problem is a complete and utter lack of anchor text diversification. Not so much where the links are coming from.
You can see at ahrefs here why the are ranking around 150 for toilet paper coupons. Well over 90% of the IBLs are all one phrase.

snoggle replied: The links have dropped and so has the page rank. 4 is still respectable. Shows to me that Google Page Rank can be fooled and is a faulty indicator. There are many directories with high P/R that sell products such as non-prescription Viagra, and have spammy links in the wrong categories.

Google does not appear to discriminate between the good and bad, hopefully in the long term they will. White hat is a long term strategy.

shadev replied: because these people aren’t into it for the long term….these are the fly by night sites….in it for a quick buck and then gone once the money runs out…
hence why directories for so long had such a bad rep

but then again I really don’t care what google says/does/thinks….pr is/has/always will be a joke. SERPs of course are nice. But in the end you do for you and your clients and word of mouth will 10 fold your traffic/income.