Is the "Hilltop" algorithm really being used by Google and how will it affect PR under our linking strategy?

The hilltop algorithm actually works in favour of those members of the webring as each webring member would qualify as an "expert site" (A directory of non-affiliated sources) but also benefit from the link from other "expert sites" in the webring because those links signify it as an authoritative entity.

The argument can be made that there is an "affiliation" between your sites acting as directories as many of you link to the same sites, however I do not believe this is the case - Just look at most of your rankings and you'll see why.

However in addition to your webring and link exchange efforts hilltop wants you to be listed in completely unique and separate entities (Zeal and DMOZ) for example and have the relevance determined on page match the outbound linktext vote. Thus if your about [url=http://www.jimmessenger.com]Phoenix Real Estate[/ur] and you have happen to get listed in the phoenix real estate category of dmoz http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/North_A...ential/Agents/ with that particular anchor text then you can bet your ranking will go up as a result.




Abstract:
we propose a novel ranking scheme for broad queries that places the most authoritative pages on the query topic at the top of the ranking. Our algorithm operates on a special index of "expert documents." These are a subset of the pages on the WWW identified as directories of links to non-affiliated sources on specific topics. Results are ranked based on the match between the query and relevant descriptive text for hyperlinks on expert pages pointing to a given result page. http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~georgem/hilltop/