Are Directory Listing Helpful For PageRank Anymore?

The big news this month as reported in PlanetOcean was that Google is ruthlessly cracking down on a large number of well-known paid directories.
Of course, people are wondering if this is the end of directories as link building tools? The answer is no unless it's a garbage directory. Going forward you'll want to be selective as to where you spend your money to get your site listed. We advise that you limit your overall number of incoming directory links to under about 10% of your overall link profile to avoid looking like your site relies too heavily on directory links.

It's particularly interesting that, while Google wiped out the rankings of a number of well-known directories, they didn't touch many of the other far-more-spammy directories. Thus far it looks like they cherry-picked some high profile sites to, maybe, send a message to all the other directories out there to clean up their act. The guess being tossed around is that Google's action is meant to instill fear in directories that were obviously buying or selling large numbers of links. If Google can get them to voluntarily clean up their act, maybe it will result in better search relevancy without having to actually open up an algorithmic cleaning of the entire index.

It's important to note that it's very unlikely that your site will be penalized for being listed in any of these directories, so don't worry about that, but watch where you spend money for links for sure. It is likely that these directories have lost their ability to pass PageRank back to you in any way. So, if you bought a listing in one of these directories in order to increase your rankings, you're no longer getting any bang for your buck.