There is no doubt that the importance Google places on links from web directories is falling. In fact, they have expressed this overtly in their latest guidelines for webmasters. So… what does this mean for us? Are we to give up on directories altogether?
Well, my opinion is that there is definitely still some value in directories. The Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) are still worth a link. The reason they are still valued is that they are edited manually. They are directories for the sake of directories. Not directories for the sake of links. If a directory exists solely to create links (and the vast majority of them do unfortunately) then they are actually pretty useless. This is what Google is telling us directly.
However, one very good reason to advertise in a web directory is if you think that it will bring traffic to your site. Generally, the more niche they are, the more these directories cater for a specific vertical market, the better they will serve this purpose.
And that’s about it really. At the end of the day – is it still worth spending hours submitting your site to untold directories? In a word – NO!
I have to say that there is definitely value in submitting links to directories, as Google still uses it’s crawlers in a way that when it approaches sites like web directories, it still combs over sites that are contained with it.
In saying the above comment, there is no real value in submitting to directories with the nofollow attribute attached to them. That is because the attachment is basically saying to Google to ignore the links that the nofollow attribute has been attached to. While you could get some traffic from that link (by people visiting the directories in question and seeing the website link), your site won’t get any Page Rank value from the site.