It kind of depends on what you mean by directories is it the likes of Yahoo or is it one of the many hundreds of directories that you will find all over the web. The problem with some of these directories is nobody’s ever heard of them and they have little chance of ever being found.

So best practice comes down to the type of site you have, if its a brand-new website that has just been launched for the first-time ‘then you basically have nothing to lose and may pickup a few good links along the way but don’t expect great results.

If however you’re running a campaign for rte.ie that has good ranking then you are basically wasting your time, as there is zero value in submitting this to the 1000 directories that you can find.  I mean let’s look at rte.ie it’s a 12-year-old website (maybe older archive.org only go back to 1996) do you think a well-linked site is going to benefit from a few new links from these crappy little directories?  I don’t think this website would even benefit from a Yahoo directory listing at this stage  but that remains to be seen.

Have we asked the question?  Is there such a thing as best practices? if you have a well established site that is really well linked and ranking well then submitting to directories is going to have little effect.