An interesting tidbit was given to me by my friend Justin - a very respected SEO who had recently talked to Google engineers about site optimization issues. The knowledge was frightening...
Google will create a site and submit it to a massive directory submission service and watch where their links start appearing. They assume that since these links appeared through an automatic script, that all the other sites on that directory were automatically submitted as well, and they discount all outgoing links from that directory. In other words, they won't penalize you, but you just wasted your money by submitting to 75,000 directories at once. Unless, of course, the traffic directly from those directories makes up for it - but that's pretty doubtful...
TG
Labels: seo