Have you ever spent countless hours submitting your website to a directory just to gain a better PageRank? Or maybe you submit your site just to get a couple of monthly hits from it.
But the truth is, that more than 98%* of Directories, are almost useless when it comes to gaining you a better page rank and gaining you traffic.
Why, you ask? Look at the following example of a typical Directory.

(I WAS ASKED TO REMOVE THE IMAGE, apparently my title should have been “What directory owners don’t want you to know”)

As you can see, this Directory has a home page with PR of 5, so you say “Wow this must be a good directory, I should submit my site so I can get a good backlink.” But then you click on that directory’s ‘Blog’ Category Section… and now you see that the PR of that page is not even rated! But you are faithful that your backlink will get you a better pagerank, so you click the category that you want, for this example it will be “Business”. Now you see that that category doesn’t even have a page rank, and the worse part is that it only shows the most recently submitted websites on the landing page, and now you realize that the Business category has 5+ pages, and each of those pages have no PR at all.

(I WAS ASKED TO REMOVE THE IMAGE, apparently my title should have been “What directory owners don’t want you to know”)

Now, that is the reason why you should not get desperate and submit your site to a ton of directories because they don’t really make much of a difference in Pagerank because Google ranks backlinks by the rank of the page where the backlink is, not by the rank of the page’s homepage like we saw before.
Think of it this way, If you have 1,000 backlinks from a PR-0 site, it will be like having 1 backlink from a PR-10 site. Obviously, the last statement is not true, and it’s just an example to let you know how worthless a backlink from a PR-0 site is, so please don’t take it seriously and start submitting your site to 1000 different directories.

The funny thing about the directory I used as an example, is that they charge $25 just to be the Featured link on a part of their network, I would never, ever pay a penny to be featured in a directory, as most of the times the only people who go to a directory are just going there to add their site, not to look for something, because if we want something we can just ‘Google it’.

Edit: Someone just opened my eyes and he let me know that submitting to directories is in fact useful, submitting to directories for Google Pagerank is not. The reason of this is because there are other search engines that are not as big as google, such as Yahoo and Microsoft live, but they still count the backlinks your website has, no matter what Pagerank it has. Sorry for the confusion, but don’t waste your time getting backlinks for Google PageRank as it does not work at all.

* = Data is not statistically correct, it is just a guess.