I recently hired a company to submit my website to 500 high PR directories and it didn't seem to affect my PR at all. Do I have to wait for a while before Google picks up my links?
Google exports the page rank to the toolbar(and other pr checking options) once in 3 months or so. Adding the time taken to crawl the directories etc., it could eb anywhere between 1 month to 6 months before you see the effect of directory submission as PR. Also, do not expect any real PR increase by submitting to 500 free directories. In most directory, your links may not be approved or will be buried in inner pages which google doesnt crawl or assign a page rank. If you are currently having a low PR(below 3), free submissions can cause an a maximum of increase of 1 PR, otherwise you may not see any increase at all. Dont expect much and dont expect something fast. If you want to see the results of submission do a backlink checking on google and also on yahoo/msn for your domain.
Geez, I really don't track PR anymore, only SERPs. I guess if I was selling links I'd care. Recently a site of mine slipped from PR4 to PR3, but the rankings were still great for the keywords I cared about, so I couldn't care less.
1 . PR updates once at 3-4 months so .... you got the ides 2 . PR is just a number concentrate on other things like rankings and traffic
If your 500 submissions were all the same (same title, same site-description) your return on that will also be very, very limited.
Just having article submission is not a good strategy either, you need to create a more natural linking profile
Directory and article site is not only way to build link, try out to implement other method to get quality backlinks that has been discussed several time.
Check the PR of the internal pages of the article directories. Notice how there is NO Google PR whatsoever? And as pagination occurs, whatever link juice that your article was giving you will plummet. Don't expect high PR out of article submissions.
Mate, submitting to 500 articles at once will give you nothing. please remember the duplicate content policy. Article submission actually is good, it's a very superb promotional method if you know how to do and optimize it. But one again, remember the duplicate content policy. You must submit different article to each directory. If not, then most of your links will be filtered.
PR update is after 3-4 months....just wait for that update and you can wether your PR will going up or going down...