Doing that gives you a very small sample of backlinks to the site, which might or might not be useful. Link popularity, AKA pagerank was defined here.
Google takes both the volume and quality of the back links that your web pages have received from other sites. Basically, there are two important aspects that Google looks at before giving any credits to your web pages, such as the categories that you have submitted your pages to in major directories and the pages you have received the back links from. If you have submitted your pages to the appropriate category while submitting your website to the major directories then your web pages have higher chance of getting good weightage by Google. Besides, you the pages where your pages have the back links from are optimized on the same keyword phrases then it counts a lot.