What do you look at when you submit yo a directory? Is it: link strength not banned category strength (by PR and links from main page to sub categories?) free/paid listings ?
Check with Google if recent entries have been picked up and indexed. Or at least check the date of the cached copy of the front page to see how often googlebot comes around. No need to submit to a directory that never gets crawled and pages never get indexed.
but dont check the PR through the google tool bar since that information is months old, you wont know from the tool bar what the PR of that page is now, but anything that might look bad like a link farm i'd stay away from it, a while ago i saved up some directories with a decent PR that i was gonna submit later to once my sites were finished and about aftr a year i checked back on them, they were punished by google both the homepage and the deep links page.
i have made a list of current and up to date PR3+ directories and those are free. most of them are PR3, and PR4s are really hard to find. There was a PR update few days ago and most of the dirs that were PR3 went down to PR1-2 rather then go up. it's like 100 went down and maybe just 1 went up to PR4. Would you suggest to submit to free directories like the list i have (which i re filtered after recent PR update) to PR4+? or would only paid dirs that are not link farms are good? I heard some people say every link should be counted - what do you think about this statement?
When I submit my site to directories, I make sure that the directory site is new. Fresh directories quickly approved pending request. I focus to free submission rather than paid ones!