I have had it pointed out that, even though my site has a PR of 5 that my directory pages have pr of zero so they have little value.

But I have wondered why, since a directory is nothing more than a list of categories and links, is there any PR placed on them at all? I mean, what qualifies one list of categories over another? Is there a magic number of number of categories to display per page? Number of links on the page? Age of the site might be a major criteria but there doesn't seem to be anywhere near enough criteria on a directory page to begin to justify the large range of possible PR does it?

PR has nothing to do with what kind of a web site you have but its passed on to a site for its incoming link score so if you have good links pointing to your site you would get a higher PR

To expand that a little, page rank applies specifically to *pages* - so when you say your site has 5, you probably mean youe root index?

I'm not sure what you mean by directory; is it a directory for people to find quality web sites (like ODP)? - or is it a collection of exchanged links?

If the latter, then dumping it completetly will probably benefit your site.

If your index is pr=5, then any page on your site with pr=grey (except newish pages), may be saying "I am having a negative effect on your site; dump me!"

And it depends a lot of your directory structure. In my experience having your categories in the URL path is better than having them as a parameter. Having multiple other parameters (like language, ...) confuses google even more.

But how Google rates those things changes all the time, so experience is not all one needs...

BTW: I would think a construct like "/index.php/104/60" is not optimal. First of all, I don't know how google treats those "index.php" in the middle of an url path. At least like an additional level, and you want to avoid those. Additinally I don't think having numbers in the path is a good thing, since numbers don't add any search value. Apart from me not knowing if number don't even get penalized for "looking like automated content".

Re: what kind of directory, I review every site and I would say the quality of the sites is pretty good.

Re: the numbers in the url, yeah I agree that names would be better. One of these days I'll recode that.

Thanks for all the input. A lot of good points