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A bigger question would be have you seen a change in the amount of quality traffic to your site? In the amount of conversions? If those haven't been negative, I wouldn't worry about the toolbar page rank update.

Yep, 5k more - if it is important to you to be sure, you could run some ads and look at the number of impressions.

I think you should worry less about SEO best practices, which you seem to have a firm grip on, and more about how your customers would navigate through your website to find these pages. What are they looking for? What are your competitors doing? What feels natural? What do you want your navigation to look like? How could you naturally clusters your different type of pages? What would /trading look like?

Some of these directories take data dumps from DMOZ (http://www.dmoz.org/rdf.html). So I guess it all depends when they grabbed the data last.

Hi Ilya My first thought is why would those top ranking sites want to engage in reciprocal linking, what's in it for them!  If they are ranking highly, supposedly with authoritive sites, wouldn't make much sense for them to do so.  If the link was one way to them, sure, but reciprocal, doubt it. Engaging with authoritive site owners/publishers and building up a relationship over time can lead to a one-way link from them, usually much more valuable than a reciprocal link. I'd suggest spending your valuable time on tasks other than reciprocal linking, the benefits are not usually worth it these days. Create high quality content that others, including those highly ranking sites, would want to link to, then distribute that content well, seed it, engage with others about it, sure, that's a more effective way to acquire those all important authoritive links that matter. If you haven't already read it, a relevant blog post here on SEOmoz entitled "Proving Trust on the Web" is well worth a read. One of the topics mentioned is Links.  Time spent Building Trust to help obtain those all important valuable links is usually far more productive and beneficial than participating in reciprocal linking. Regards Simon

I hate to say it, but I'm with Marty. There's just no way to tell, and it's completely dependent on the editor(s) for your niche. Recently, I'm seeing many cases where people get a DMOZ listing and it's so deep in the site that the page isn't even indexed - so they wait months for this "great" link that then passes no link-juice at all. File a good submission and get on with life - that's all you can do, unless you know an editor personally.

Easy double check is to use Chrome - open a Chrome session and then do CTRL+SHIFT+N - opens Chrome in "incognito" mode... "You've gone incognito. Pages you view in this window won't appear in your browser history or search history, and they won't leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you closeall open incognito windows. Any files you download or bookmarks you create will be preserved, however." You can also add the "Google Global" extension (FF & Chrome)... Google Global extension for Google Chrome - version 1.0 This extension allows you to get Google search results from different countries, regions, cities and US zip codes To download the latest version, please visit the extension page Hope that helps...

Matt Cutts claimed that they do not count some links just last month (Pubcon).  So, they can decide not to if the other site (not yours) is of too low of quality.

Yes, I know that. I will make different links to look natural and variations of the desired keyword.

Man ... a category is very similar to a catalog ... both are listings ... You should take a look at imdb.com here you should really call me and i can help you free of course.

Also keep in mind that Open Site Explorer does not crawl the entire web, just the top 25-35% of it. That page is buried a bit deep on the site, so it the OSE crawl may not get that deep on the site. OSE and Google are two different crawlers, so Google may well see the link when OSE doesn't.

I use WordTracker (You can signup for a free trial) - it lets you type in your domain, competitor domains, and viola - shows you who is linking to where - where you could possibly get links etc. Very helpful tool. I think it would work well in your case because SOMEONE is linking to "boring" content - and having this sort of visibility allows you to see where the story makers are coming from.

Thanks EGOL! another great reply from you We decided to take your advice and just keep the content on our own site. Cheers, Storwell

Thanks! Ill have a look at it.