Thank you guys for participating and expressing your views. Its always good to hear different opinions to make a good judgement. Personally I consider 2 things when I buy links from a directory-- The innerpage PR (where I would be listed) and the PR strength of backlinks so that I don't have to worry one of my backlinks may downgrade sometime in future. I saw that --Google backlinks are very easy to achieve. One just has to buy site-wide links on big sites with hundreds of cached pages --and your sites Google backlinks will jump by like a ........... My site got some backlinks during last update and when I checked I found that it has lots of links that G treated as backlinks from same site-IP which I think s useless number in terms of PR. But --I would imagine it helps one's SERPs. Any more views???