Can someone give me criteria with which to judge the quality of submission directories.

[JesseCWalker]

The general advice is the SEOmoz community is not to bother with low quality submission directories.  Makes sense to me as there existence seems solely to manipulate search rankings, which google doesn't like.

So what are some clear and actionable criteria to distinguish between a directory worth spending time on and one that is not worth spending time on?

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Jesse

In a nutshell, relevance and quality.

No point going after general purpose directories and there is equally no point if it is a free for all.

If there are high quality, discerning, topical directories in your industry that actually serve a purpose, then, go for it. Also, whilst most topically diverse directories are a waste of time there  may be some decent local directories worth considering if you serve a small geographic area.

As ever, there is no exact answer, it depends on the business and various other factors such as what geographical area that business operates in.

Want to throw the link out there? Maybe we can do a bit of a case study and see whta is about?

Marcus

[JesseCWalker]

Sure I've got two:

http://www.directorydolphin.com

http://www.ezeesubmiturl.com/

One of the sites I'm looking to build links for is optimizing for "personal trainer", or more specifically "minneapolis personal trainer".  Would it be worth it to bother with these directories for a personal training website?

[SparkplugDigital]

One thing we look at is if the page your link is on is indexed in Google and if the cache date is recent. Also if there are too many other links on the page, your link juice can be greatly diluted. Seomoz' list of top directories is also helpful.

[EssEEmily]

Another good indication is whether or not they link to your competitor. I mostly find directories from looking at competitors' back link profiles. Most of them are industry specific and, assuming they are still maintained, worth the couple of minutes it takes to submit.