Sure, you can submit your site to quality directories, it will definitely help you, but you should take care of some important issues. 1. Titles should be rotated ( use 4 to 6 different titles). 2. Description should also be rotated. 3. Dont target one keyword. etc
Some of the conversations on the blogs of the SEO folks who seem to have influence at the G-Plex are getting more and more contradictory about the impact of negative SEO. While they say a competitor can't hurt your site they also say that Penguin targeted sites with a bad link profile. Doing submissions to well-maintained and quality directories still seems to have a positive impact. Doing submissions to poorly maintained, spam-filled directories may no longer be harmless.
I agree with YMC here. Which means you need to be more and more selective about which directories to submit to. e.g. We recently took the 134 directories that Subi collated for April, and were able to get rid of 117 of those directories based on low-quality indicators. These indicators include things like default templates, poor keyworded URL naming (things like free-submit-directory . org), directory networks (similar directories owned by the same people), etc. That left us with 17 directories, which then need to be further evaluated on their own merits for content and the like. Don't just submit to hundreds of directories because there are hundreds of new ones available. Really look at the ones you submit to and their content in particular and decide for yourself if you want them linking to you. Sadly Google continues to confuse the issue by issuing strong PageRank to low quality sites. Do you submit to those ones or not? It's difficult to answer that because Google pushes you away with one hand and draws you closer with the other.
If you submit your website on high quality directories with related subject and categories you will still get good result.
Direction Submission is good but you need to make sure that sites on which you are doing submission are on different ips and do submission only on PR Directory sites
I think that in better case the only one directory from these 134 is qualitative. I have not seen no one list of really high-quality directories as top 50 or top 100. In the each list I have seen many non-qualitative directories.
Check out our latest blog post on this topic - Why directory submissions are effective even after Penguin.
That's because these sorts of lists are collated from newly announced directories. From that list of 134 I would tend to agree with you. The 17 I plucked from that, would then need to be analysed for quality (I didn't analyse the 117 I removed, they had big red flags that made it easy to discard them without needing to delve any deeper). A quick glance at the remaining 17 tells me we have 2 of them listed in our free directory list. The rest probably wouldn't make it. We are far more strict on paid directories. I am working on a strongest directories list, that is more geared around age and which will ignore price (I've always concentrated on free directories but more and more these days the paid directories are standing out as the strongest option because of their hard line on review). So don't believe there isn't one out there, I think it's just more attractive to generate a list for free directories because people flock to sizeable lists that cost them no money.
No problem as long as you submit at a slow space. Do not forget to use different titles, description. Most of the high pr websites accept only reciprocal or paid listing. At-least go for some high pr reciprocal link submission.
There is no harm for directory submission but matter you submitted is relevant. Directory submission is an easy and natural way of link building. Its is very important for your website as it is a good source of traffic and backlinks and directory submission is the best part of SEO.
After penguin update, if you want to take the advantage of directory submission then you should submit it only in the relevant and niche directory and try to submit it in the niche directory which have some pagerank. It will be more beneficial for your site.