So this page was once an advertisement by a phpLD directory owner who wanted to sell links on their directory. The offering went something like this…

Submit your site today!

The directory is well established for more than 2 years and well indexed by major search engines.

The site is PR4

Lifetime Featured Link for just 14$ with 5 extra deep links
Lifetime Normal Link for just 10$ with 3 extra deep links

Don’t miss this opportunity!!!!!

But now it is gone!

Clearly Google was not prepared for PageRank to be such a commodity to be bought and sold, but thousands upon thousands of directory owners were able to earn money by setting up a directory and selling links. And since they also had links pointing to their own site, this gave them PageRank, and that PageRank had a value on the market. 

PageRank 3 and 4 directories could easily get $10 per link (maybe with “deep links”), and PageRank 6+ directory could get 100s of dollars per link. Some people became rich overnight, including people from 2nd or 3rd world countries (ex. Pakistan, Iran, Malaysia and Indonesia). 

Whether you view this as good for them or something shady, it was something that helped a lot of people, and also something that became more and more corrupted over time. Lower quality sites that sold illegal goods or got their high pagerank by hacking into other websites, and adding hidden links started to enter the market.

Finally, a few years ago, Google simply stopped allowing their PageRank to be known, and after many years, this sort of thing is quite uncommon.