What are your views on link submitters / directory submitters?

[Benj25]

I have no real opinion on them to be honest, I don't really have any experience with them personally:

eg: http://www.fastdirectorysubmitter.com/downloads.html

http://www.thelinksubmitter.com/

http://www.dumpblaster.com/

I presume they will be negative or a waste of time?

[EGOL]

Just an opinion...

I don't use these products.  I believe that any link that can be obtained by anybody using any form of automatic submission is not going to be worth much.  I believe that those sites will be stuffed so full of manipulative links to manipulating sites that their value will be zero.  I honestly would worry that having a bunch of these links would put a bad odor on my site.

[Benj25]

That was exactly my feeling.

[RyanKent]

Pure fluff, a waste of time and it makes it harder for a good SEO to do their job.

The analogy I like to use is an electrician doing their job. You want to move power from point A to point B. You want to monitor the flow of that power as well. If you have 10 power cables then you can clearly view your power flow. If you have 1010 cables but only 10 of them are actually flowing power then it's a mess to sort through.

The only caveat I will add is there are some sites with good DA and decent PA which can be manipulated to flow rank to your site. For example there are some Chinese government sites that don't nofollow links and a few asian blogs as well. I am confident Google will catch on but for now, it works. I don't believe the submitters you shared use these particular sites but they are examples. They could anchor their sites which lack value with one or two sites that actually flow link juice right now, but it's only until Google pulls the plug.

[Benj25]

Exactly what I thought. Thanks both.

[firstconversion]

I did a trial about a month ago, after the last panda update. 770 submissions and after 2 weeks I could find only 5 in Google (and of that only 1 provided a link back, the other 4 sites had stripped them out)

This is one of the reasons im turning to stuff like myblogguest, but im not convinced of it yet

[MBayes]

Spend the money on a well written piece of content to add to your site. Much better investment.

[IPINGlobal54]

In general - tools like this are rarely worth the time or hassle at all, as has been said - however, thats not to say that all directory submission is a waste of time.

If a directory stands up to scrutiny - then submission can be worth it, for example:

It has a good DA and the subject section has a good P/A

It has a relevant section to your niche

It will actually give you a link and not strip it out after you post it.

The page on which you link is displayed is not buried deep in the directory structure (like dmoz)

The directory and its pages are not stuffed with adsense or advertising

The directory is not full of dupe content.

The chances of any bulk submission software or tool finding a significant number of directories that meet the above conditions are virtually non-existent, and the handful that will apply to your business and be worth getting a link on will be reasonably easy to find yourself.