Isn't Google's overarching goal to make its ranking reflect real human preferences? To that end, they work very hard to disallow people to manipulate the system. They started with the idea of a link as a vote because that's supposed to reflect what people really think and do. They're even now going so far as to try to uncover paid links. Yet, despite having this goal in mind and working very hard towards it, webmasters can still boost their PR and therefore SERP standing by submitting to directories?! Let's get real...no one actually uses directories. People who are searching for stuff use search engines. Why, therefore, does google or any other SE give links from them any weight? They're purely a tool of webmasters used for manipulating search engines. Help a noob understand...why are directories not totally irrelevant? Why do I read everywhere that directory submission is very important when submitting to them seems so patently manipulative and detached from how real web surfers behave?
Well... links are weighed differently. With directories at.. lets say a PR 6, some of its "PR juice" as we can call it, will be given to your site.. And yes, I agree using tons of directories somewhat manipulates the whole purpose of the PR..
That's not true. People just don't use bad directories. There are plenty of high quality directories, including a growing number of specialist directories. I run an indie music directory that gets more browsers looking for resources than submissions coming in easily, and another specialty directory that's pretty much even on uses. And of course there are higher quality, better-known directories like Dmoz and Yahoo's directory that are used. Hell, if Google were to go completely anti-directory, they'd have to get rid of their own. The directories used just for PR are nothing more than link farms, and they're already weighted differently like was said above... but that's far from classifying every directory out there.