What went wrong?

As expected for any method that was making money some people started abusing directory submissions. It takes less than 20 minutes to get a new directory up and running with some commonly available directory scripts. People started making 100s of directories and guaranteed directory listings were hugely popular (some people still love those). When people start selling links blatantly to manipulate Google’s algorithm it was bound to take some step and it made examples out of some big directory names. Besides this, quality of directories has gone down significantly with each directory looking like a cheap clone of another one.

Are they really dead?

There are two type of people who say directory submission doesn’t work. We have already talked about the ignorant type who are just repeating what they heard elsewhere without bothering to test the hypothesis. The other type has tried directory submissions and have seen a decline in ROI (return on investment) on directory submission. I won’t dispute this; directory submissions can hardly move a keyword in SERPs if it has good competition. What these webmasters need is to outsource directory submission to people who can do it at cheaper rates. You need to find people who are still submitting to directories manually and who are not in turn outsourcing it to others thereby increasing the overall cost.

One can still get a PR 2 or PR 3 with 1000 directory submissions and can still reach first page if competition is not very high. I will ask directory submission bashers to try it out for one of their sites and then make an opinion about it.