I’m often asked, post Google Panda, whether web directories and still important and my response is also why not? It, of course, depends on the web directories in question. Some might be useless whilst others will have a positive effect in terms of link juice and direct traffic from visitors who are searching for your products or services. I’ve just been don’t some late night / early morning back-link building a popped Internet Marketing Platinum into a few web directories. A few of the lesser known ones, they have good Alexa rankings and most of the back-links that they have pointing to them looked good. One of these web directories is 123 Hit Links and I’ve actually named them specifically because they require a reciprocal link. They are human edited so that is a plus point so this is a pretty decent web directory to submit your website to.
So to answer the question “Are web directories still useful?” I would always ask the link-builder or client or whoever to due their research and make their own judgements because link-building isn’t that clear cut but I would certainly say that submitting your site manually to directories is still a good option but, obviously, not the only option.