Google sell their own links, see
here
People should spend more time researching factual information, rather than taking forum posts as Gospel.
Why did Google target certain high ranking directories?
Because they networked with their peers to over inflate their sites PR, this gave the impression a website was more established than it actually was. The only way to sort out this problem was to manually cut the selected sites. Googles job was made much easier as all they had to do was read the Digital Point forum.
Of course this act by Google was followed by mass panic and hysteria by people who are ignorant to the working of search engines.