Matt Cutts recently shared a video he made in response to a question he received from someone who asked if Google views directory submissions to paid directories as paid links (which generally results in penalties from the big G).
To get to the meat & potatoes of his response… he said that there are certain factors that differentiate a “paid link” from a legitimate directory link. The main factors he mentioned are how much the directories charge to submit to them, whether submissions are reviewed resulting in poor quality sites being rejected and their policies on anchor text.
Matt stated in the past that the google webmaster guidelines included a statement about it being beneficial to submit your site to directories, and because of this the practice was abused. Thousands of directories sprouted up offering to add your site to their PR6 directory for a certain cost which led to further abuse.
Due to this, Google has different criteria in place to measure the “value” of directories… so not all directories are treated equally.
The take away I got from this is certain directories like Yahoo! and Best Of The Web aren’t viewed as paid links and can still hold quite a bit of benefit in terms of SEO. As far as submitting to “fly by night” directories or paying somebody on Digital Point $20 to submit your site to 2000 different directories… seems like it is a waste of time.
