I am a little confused on directory submissions. I read sometimes that people have a drop in PR and SEO after hiring someone to submit URL to a bunch of directories. At the same time I read people that have someone submit their site to over 2000 directories over a couple months and it helps them. Which one is correct?
Web directories help your site if it is related to your niche or if it is a respected general directory that is well edited. A link from another site won't hurt your rankings...or your competitors could simply go on a web directory link building campaign to kill your site.
Those in the directory "industry" all claim it helps; BUT, I do not know of one "professional" SEO that does it or recommends it these days (with the exception of a dozen or so major or niche directories). At the major SEO conferences, it gets dismissed as a pretty useless method of link building. The SEO kiddies still recommend it.
it worked for me. so i know that from personal experience regardless of what any experts say. helped the search engine results and also the pagerank. I do it manually, changing the description and anchor text from time to time. it only makes sense the whole internet is based on links so the more links; as they say here the more qualitative links you have back to you site, from all sorts of sources direcorties, social bookmarks, article submission etc etc, the better off you rankings are going to be. of course your content and on site optimization have to be taken care of too.
Do they hurt you? Definitely not. Do they help? Not if you want to rank for 'seo' or 'finance' kind of keywords. But they are effective for mild competition keywords. Most TOP SEOs don't recommend it because they have better methods to create such backlinks. A well crafted linkbait will definitely take less amount of time but can result into a huge surge in number of backlinks. Directory submissions is one of easiest and cheapest methods to get backlinks but it's not the best method.
I don't think they harm you, but they don't efficient as well. I didn't see any traffic from hundreds of directories i submited my site to.
Directory submissions are done now a days only for SEO purpose and not to get traffic. In fact if you get good backlinks then higher the chances that you rank high on google or any other SE. So directories do deliver traffic, but indirectly.
how much they will help depends on where you submit to but surely it won't hurt. if it did, then evil competitors would use it to hurt their competitor sites
If the directory shows up in the SERPs for your keywords, then it will help. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother. A link from a directory which shows up for your keyword will give you better ranking as well as traffic from the listing in the directory. The best links you can get are from pages ranking above you in SERPs, anyways. Focus on those.