Waste of time; directory backlinks are considered non-relevant and of low quality. Your time could be spent much better doing other things. If I was to estimate a "waste of time" time frame I would say a few weeks if your not using any automated software.
If you're going to get 10,000 backlinks then it's not a "waste of time" as said above. All backlinks have some google juice even if it is PR0. You want to be submitting no more than 50 a day to make sure that you won't get penalised by google. So that's 200 days of 50 a day. I'm assuming that's what you wanted to know.
I said it was a waste of time; 10,000 irrelevant low quality backlinks don't equal the value of 100 very relevant high quality backlinks; cut and dry common sense. Not to mention most search engines de-value web directories, if not penalize them for selling text links.
Obviously this is the case. But I think submitting 10,000 links over the course of 200 days can only benefit the site, even if most are low quality. I just don't think if he has a program or has paid a service for 10,000 backlinks it is a waste. I agree with you that his money was better invested in 100 relevant and high quality sites.
I would say if you do 100 submissions per day in directories 10000 submissions would take you 100 days If you do more submissions in a day, you will take less time. If you do this in automated way (not recommended) you will take less time I would suggest you spend the money / time on getting quality backlinks
You offer 1,000 directory submissions, why not just times that timeframe by 10? If you must get rubbish backlinks, fire up your submission tool and it would probably take an afternoon.
It's just I've heard from multiple sources that creating more than 50 back links a day might get you in trouble with G. It would make sense if google penalises.
Some popular sites build 500+ new backlinks a day; again as sweetfunny stated and I concur if it was possible to get penalized for too many backlinks in any specific amount of time everyone would do it to their competitors. Lets use common sense here people.
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10K directory submission can be done, well if this is the only thing you're going to do it'll take you 2 months (I guess). I also have this on my dir list, not all of them are quality sites though. I don't think google will penalize for building a lot of backlinks a day.