Anyone notice their Directory PR change?

I own and run a directory that I spent weeks building and promoting just to find that after getting hundreds of link exchanges and submissions it would only get 20-40 hits of traffic a day from keyword searches in google. It had great PR and any site I sponsors on the front page would spike to a PR2 in couple of months. A year went by just like this and 3 months ago I just stopped doing anything with it because it was only good for passing PR which isn't even what I built it for. I built this site for women who have blogs they want to submit for phone entertainment. I wanted to get traffic from google to send men right to the type of entertainer they wanted. NOW after over a year of nothing 3 weeks ago it just spiked up to the 1st - 3rd page of google for all the good keywords. I'm so extatic! What happen? I didn't do anything different. I just approve a blog or two a week just like normal.

Was there a change in how directories are looked at by google?

or

Could there have been a penalty that was on my site that lifted after so long? I did pay someone to link me up on a pr5 sitewide a year ago and they got smacked from a PR5 to a PR0(I assume busted). After that happen I didn't do anything questionable like that. So I was thinking maybe a ban lifted?

could be or it could just be that google adjusted their algorithm and it gave you a boost (they adjust all the time). Also they do of course factor in how long your site has been around, so that could have helped.

Thanks, actually I purchased the domain 14 months ago and developed it a year ago so maybe thats the key!