potentialgeek - 8:08 am on Dec 21, 2011 (gmt 0)

Paid directories were a reasonable idea in 1995.

Cutts recently sent a signal that Google will be moving away from respecting article submission sites because the editorial discretion is limited. For the same reason they will move away from paid directories.

Now that Google's algo is much more sophisticated, and it has so many signals, there is so little value in paid directories.

Panda was a shot across the bow against article sites. Paid directories are only one step up in discretion, (and sometimes worse), so they are logically the next algo target.

P.S. "Good" article sites had decent pagerank and it was irrelevant with Panda.