A little over 10% is abysmal! Those of you who think it's a good result are either submitting junk or spending too much time submitting to junk directories. Be more picky about the directories you submit to. I would guess only about 10-20% of the directories that I visit are worthy of submitting to. Check the date of the last new listing, check the waiting list if posted and review if the categories stay on topic. Submit to well-run sites only and you'll see that acceptance rate increase to 50-75%. Of course, that assumes you are submitting something worth linking to.
It takes some weeks or even months that some directories review your website and approve it. Also you should not expect most directories approve your website. I think if about 30% of them approve you, its really good.
this is why i take out thier linkback if i found out they still didn't approve my site before the update of google. directory owners want thier links to sites to gain pr. while your not.
I've been on a bender submitting the Photographic Dictionary.com to free directories lately. Mostly from lists of free directories. It is amazing how many are broken, the domains are expired, the submit link doesn't work, the captcha input box doesn't take enough characters to enter the captcha, or just general stuff like horrendous formatting and spelling errors. Or there's no category that suits an encyclopedia. However, I figure I have absolutely nothing to lose submitting anyway. It might do something. It probably won't. The site has had PR 3 since I launched it and with the mayday changes I'm getting way more hits from Google so it'll probably get organic links on its own anyway. Just be nice to push it over the edge to PR4. It has no DMOZ entry - if I got one of those it would probably tip it over to PR4. Alexa has been showing 6 incoming links for this site since forever, and doing the same thing on one of my other sites as well as a long-running link exchange campain on that other site (basically means I'm building a link directory of my own on another site) hasn't done anything for the Alexa incoming links either.
My experience is that automatic directory submission is quite useless. A very low percentage is approved and this number will on decrease in the future. 31 directories out of 300 is not bad, but how does Google value them?
Seems like the right amount of links are coming out. Never expect a link to show just because you submit it. If there is a paid option, the ratio of approval for a free option goes down dramatically.