Directory Submission Service

[malice95]

I am tempted to use a directoty submission service to submit my site
to 500 directories. Anything I should be concerned about? Will google
penalize me if it sees 500 new links on a 1 1/2 month old domain. I am
kinda gun shy these days.

Thanks,
Mike

[radu]

first, do you consider manual submission or automatic one ?
second, do tell them to use different title and description, so it will look more natural
I don't know if Google will penalize you, maybe people more experienced here could tell us. Is expected that you won't get all the 500 new links suddenly (maybe some of them will come after 2-3 months) so IMHO it should be OK.

All best,
Radu

[speed]

Personally I wouldn't bother with such a service, I would instead select a few good directories every few days and submit my site by hand taking the time to read and comply with the submission policy of each directory. That extra time taken is likely to stand your submission in a better position for being accepted and listed.

I own a directory and submission companies are the a pain, there are far too many that have little or no interest in following any guidelines, they seem to have zero language skills and are only interested is stuffing spam filled text that may make no sense into any box they can find. Needless to say we dump those submissions on mass.

To put it another way people are paying companies to spam our free submissions and gaining nothing from it, other than maybe a ban from ever submitting to the directory.

[Duncan Pollock]

On the whole, I agree with the reservations mentioned about using a "wholesale" directory submission service.
I doubt that you'll end up with any Google penalty, if only because many of the directories will ignore mention of your site. However, inclusion in directories that include or specialize in your line of business is valuable. You just need to find out which ones are relevant and then submit to each of them manually and over a period of time rather than all at once.
In my own case, I'm included in a fair number of Real Estate directories, but this has been managed over the last four or five years. I started with a recognition/awareness of well known ones, but I then kept my eyes open on an ongoing basis and submitted my site each time I ran into a directory I hadn't known of before.
Along the way, I've tended to use the same site description, but I've varied the anchor text somewhat, often in reflection of the category in which a link to my site is most appropriate. Sometimes, I've incurred a (modest) fee for inclusion but frequently all that's required of me is a reciprocal link, which in fact (or so I like to think) adds to my credibility (as in "if he's listed in all these places, there mist be something to it.")
But again, I wouldn't recommend a mass submission service. It isn't likely to give you a good return on the money you'll need to pay.

Duncan