What I think is directory submission is the oldest method of doing link building! Don't you think so? I haven't checked the history of its and I haven't gone deeply but I feel, if you know more about it then you are welcome here to share your views. On the other hand, what I think is that if directory submission is done in the right way then it would give you good link benefit and it is good for increasing page rank. For doing it in the right way, what you have to use is try to use different description to each submission. This way all your submissions would easily be indexed in search engines hence giving you good link benefit and your links would also be search through search engines so it would give you direct visitors to your site also.
Directory submission can be great for building backlinks. Just make sure they are quality directories preferably with pr2+
Based on my experience, directory submission is a waste of time. The only directory worth submitting to is DMOZ / ODP, but that's not because you'll get any traffic from it (one of my sites is listed, and i've gotten a whopping 5 visits in 6 months) but because it will get you listed in numerous directories that use its data, such as google directory (which sent an additional 6 visits in the same time period), and it'll also get you listed in Alexa's categories. You'll see the benefits across other sites. But this is the only directory with these benefits. Humans do not use directories. They are generally only used by spammy webmasters. If you're using them, watch out, you might just be a spammer. Stop wasting your time and start putting your effort into your website and into engaging in legitimate conversation with others who are interested in your site's topic. A directory's homepage having a pagerank of 2 is meaningless; the individual sub-pages will have no pagerank. The key question should not be pagerank, but should be whether humans actually are browsing the directory. They're not. So you'll get no traffic. People theorize about the SEO benefits of these links but it's pure theory. I have a lot of google analytics data and I have seen absolutely ZERO evidence that any directory links other than ODP/DMOZ have any SEO benefits at all.
Directory submission gives one-way backlink so it is useful. Submit only high pr directories so it helps to crawl your backlink
@Cazort thanks for the insightful feedback. Have always been wondering the effectiveness of directory submission as I don't see them appearing on Yahoo Explorer at all.
Very hard to get BL from directory especially from free directories..if get also the link juice from it is very very less, the new submission goes to the en pages and some time Google not scrawling the linked page
directory submission is a nice way to get back links from different sites.but in my opinion reciprocal links would helpful to you to get back links within short period of time.
Smart thinking. Another tip: subscribe to google alerts using your domain name or whatever text that your site will be listed under in the directory. If you don't see it in google alerts, you know google hasn't seen it yet. A page appearing in google alerts is not a guarantee that google will follow and count the link, but it's probably a prerequisite for it. I've rarely seen links (using anchor text in my alert) appear in google news before they appear in google alerts.
This is a waste of time and may harm your site. Most web directories are used only by spammers; linking to them would be doing a disservice to your readers. Link only to useful and relevant sites, and you'll do better in the long-run. Most web directories aren't even crawled by google!
Cazort you are realy good at this. Thank you for the advice. I just deleted my reciprocal with the directories that i had summited. You are right nobody uses directories for good. Just spam