I respectfully disagree. I know they don't necessarily pass loads of link juice but some of the paid directories don't have all the millions of spammy links to spammy sites in... because they're paid. Some are very, very cheap too. I know most are rubbish and not worth squat but there's still lots which are cheap and do pass link juice which far outweighs the cost.

Also the paid ones add you much faster... and if you want a diverse backlink profile it's worth getting a bunch of directories in there as well as your other link types... rely on the free ones and you could be waiting forever for that.

I wouldn't worry about the PR. It won't be due to content changes anyway, since PR is based on incoming links only and has nothing to do with what you have on-page. We've gone from PR 4 to PR 5 with the update but I don't care as I practically ignore PR now anyway... can't wait for them to hopefully get rid of it. It's one tiny metric which isn't a true reflection of what they have anyway. So much more that matters.

At the moment you have a direct link from the homepage to the quickbooks hosting page with anchor text in the footer. Above that, you have some body content about quickbooks hosting (still on the homepage), put a link in there to the quickbooks hosting page. Body content links are better than footer links by far.

Also it seems that you've had the following URL's for that page:

/quickbooks-hosting.html
/host-quickbooks.html
/hosted-quickbooks.html

Were/are these all the same page just with URL changes? Have you put 301's in for them so that both older URL's point to the new one?

Wow that's a big, bold move! I don't know how to answer it but if I were you I'd wait until you get a few, nice and comprehensive answers on here before doing anything to drastic. Either that or use a private Q&A question to SEOmoz staff if you have any points spare to do so. With such a large change, you want to ensure you're doing it right.

I'll be interested to see the answers you get for this.

You might be joking but I've seen comments like that haha

Such services are often easy to spot I think

There can be massive negative effects.

1. You'll annoy a lot of blog owners, some will report you for spam

2. You'll get tonnes of worthless links from worthless blogs filled with other spammers, therefore connecting yourself to some iffy neighbourhoods

3. You'll end up with lots of links that have your same anchor text keywords in from one link type... blogs. This will look unnatural for your link profile

My view: It used to work, not so much anymore... might still work a little but there are risks, especially to your brand.

Panda seems to have diminished even more the value of low quality links, and low quality links is what you'll get with auto linking software. This brings down the benefits while the risks stay the same.

Yes I like the content registry idea! It would probably be necessary to pay for it as a service though, and to cover dupes that are okay maybe they could just allow dupes as long as they reference back to the source in the registry (for news, quotations, etc... where dupes can't be avoided).