Depends if Google may lift your PR or not.. Google is becoming very complicated in terms of PR updates
There are many manual directory link building services. For those services that say they will do 1200 submissions for $80 and then 600 links for $40, are the 600 links those with the highest authority and PR or just a random 600 selection from the larger list? Have any of you actually done some analysis of your SERP rankings before and after this service?
The benefits that the submission of your site to web directories gives you: 1. Indexing of the web site by search engines Web directories are the best way to announce your web site existence to a search engine. Search engines use crawlers or spiders to search for new and useful web sites. A spider reads a web site, goes into different links placed in that site and reports to the search engine about that site. It also returns in those sites to see the changes in those. 2. Search engines favor the sites submitted to directories When you register your web site to a directory, the site doesn’t appear in the directory immediately. It is sent to the webmaster for review. The webmaster analyses your site and decide if it is worthy to be in their directory. As the whole process is supervised by an actual person, search engines rely on that directory and favor links submitted to directories. 3. Increase of the web site ranking in search engines The main thing a search engine counts when assigning a rank to a site is a number of links the web site has. More links the site gets, higher it will be ranked in search engines. But it’s not only the quantity of links that matters; the quality of links does as well. It’s better to have less links from important sites (with 6, 7 or higher PageRank) than many links from obscure sites with 0 PageRank. Plus, directories offer one way links pointing to your site only. And search engine consider one way links to be more valuable than reciprocal links (links that are exchanged with other sites). Directories can help you out in this way too. 4. Relevant category for the web site The spiders of search engines may not categorize your website to a relevant topic, especially if your site has a poor text description, but it is rich in images, flash and animation content. If you submit your site to a relevant category in a directory, you can enable a search engine to categorize your website under a relevant topic. 5. Easy search of the site by targeted keywords/phrases When you submit your site to web directories, you generally provide the site URL, title, description and keywords. What is nice is that you can (and must) use your top keywords in your title. This makes it easy for search engines to find the link to your site by targeted phrases/keywords. 6. More traffic to your site Nowadays, people mostly use search engines to find the necessary information. However, web directories are used as well. Getting satisfied by the service, visitors bring on more traffic to your site. In that way, both the popularity and number of traffic in your site increase. As you see, listing your site in a directory has a considerable importance. No matter what type of online business you run, there is always a specific directory to cater to your need.
Based on my results I have found directories not that worthwhile anymore. Only two directories are worth submitting to: Yahoo and Open Directory. The others are just like links from anywhere else. Best links are articles with one way links or somebody places a natural link to your website. You can't cheat Google anymore.
I think directories help, but should not be seen as the be-all. Contrary to previous posts, however, people DO come to directories. Also, Google *does* index each every nook in our directories, so those links are getting juice. I would also recommend some type of RSS registration strategy. Those seem to be particularly SE friendly (probably the formatting).