Hello, im up for arguing with you on this I rank very well with one of my websites, for the main and plenty of useful keywords, sitelinks in place, pr, ranking well in other countries too, nice steady traffic to it. How i did it? probably 80% free directory submissions, the other 20% blog commenting, being lucky enough to have a handful of people just link back to it. The traffic? mostly natural search engine traffic. Yes big companies do directory submissions, yes ive personally dealt with a large seo company, this company is not some one man team but an established international one with other businesses too, and they offer directory submissions to their clients.
There is no set of directories that you would have to submit your site too. Just ensure that the directories that you submit to are search engine friendly. Don't restrict yourself to only directory submissions... try social bookmarking, article submissions etc. It is tedious so you can have professional service providers to do the job for you. Just ensure that your site is submitted manually.
Thank you for the interesting observation. I did this experiment where I took a small fresh site with 0 backlinks, chose a veeery easy long-tail keyword and picked directories where it was possible to edit your link (requires login... Doh) I made 30 directory submissions, 4 article links and 26 blog commenting + forum sigs. In a month I ranked #3 for that keyword. Then I went loggin back to the directories and removed ALL links. So, I was left with just my article links and blog comments/sigs Wanna laugh? I was still #3 and still PR1 as before I was shocked, to be honest. I believed that directories would be able to give at least a small boost. Turned out they were just a waste of time. What do you think about this experiment? I don't want to sound rude, but, hey, have you ever thought that you're ranking well solely because of the 20% link building you've done?
Its interesting, how soon did you remove those directory links? could the rank have changed once the search engines caught up with the lack of those directory links? I agree it could be down to the 20% blog commenting, it was ranking quite well though before even blog commenting. What i may do on the next new website that i may launch is to not promote it with directories for say 6 months, and only use other methods and see what happens. I have to admit, the temptation to use directories will be difficult for me as im so used to using them, so if i avoid them for experimental reasons it will be like temporarily giving up a habit.