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Sorry, I should have been more specific with my initial question. A high PR network is a privately owned network of websites each hosted on different class c ip addresses, with unique or private whois information, no website footprint between the sites (the html structure / layout of each site is different), and all reflecting good PR ranging from 3-7 with no historical large fluctuations in PR.

Owners of these networks will sell in-content homepage text link advertisements for a monthly fee ranging from $80 per month to $150 per month. A network usually consists of 35-55 websites and the link to your site using your targeted keyword would be made available on each site, usually with a unique content "blurb" on each website of about 150 words. If you stop payment, your link is removed from the entire network.

This is a very "black hat" technique to attain rankings but it appears to be working well for huge serp gains. Do you feel something like this, if done right, will be "busted" by Google? It's not fair to engage in ethical SEO and be circumvented by the black hatters!

Let me put a disclaimer here that I do not use high PR networks in any of my seo endeavors. That being said, they have always looked attractive - especially post panda where in content links from high pr websites are valuable.

I run seo campaigns for a large lot of websites & have been noticing my competition creeping past me who are using links from these networks to increase their positions for hard to attain keywords.

Has anyone here had experience building links using these types of networks? It looks like they are under google's radar for now & are a great way to get some powerful links to your site. Any thoughts on if google will catch onto these types of links if they are properly protected (limited footprint, revolving links, unique content, etc.)?

It's tough not to be at least interested in networks like this b/c of the results they provide.

According to the tools offered by SeoMoz, there is some value to outbound linking. For sites I work with,. I will frequently link out to other websites I feel could be beneficial to the end users experience (without linking to the competition of course). I see no reason why there would be a penalty. In fact, I would think any search engine would respect that you are not an island but contributing easy access to relevant information to the greater internet community.

Don't worry about passing PR and losing it because you are linking out. Too much thought goes into PR and it's effectiveness. Personally, I have sites that outrank high PR websites that reflect a 1 or 2 (compared to a 5 or 6).

I would be concerned with two aspects here: visibility (non SEO) and passing PR (SEO). Based on those points, there are few directories left that I feel are still good choices. Here is a list I follow with new websites that appear as backlinks & pass some good link juice:

1. Yahoo Directory
2. Business.com
3. JoeAnt
4. BestOfTheWeb

It's tempting to base your site on what your competition does but that will not always work for your own property. The directories mentioned above are used and actually show up in search results. I wouldn't put too much stock in directories as your main platform for SEO but as a small part to an overall strategy - it can't hurt!

I think it's a matter of preference. Where SEO comes into play is www results getting indexed as different from non www results. As a safety measure, I might add this into your .htaccess if you are on linux:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mywebsite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mywebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This will force all non www traffic to www