Is it still worthwhile to submit website in directory submission sites?

Of course directory submission works, but do it with caution. Only choose good directories, 99% auto approved sites are not good, so discard them.

There are some natural Directories you will like to submit your site to: yellow pages, service listings, local business listings... For the rest, you should be careful enough to check at least if they have Pagerank (just to know they're not banned from google).

Hope it helps!

manually submitted citations are very helpful.

Directories were and are good way to get targeted traffic and quality links. But not all of them. After latest Google updates 99% of direcotries were devalued and are worthless. Not only that, but submitting to hundreds of them can hurt your site rankings.
What you can do is to find high quality directories which are relevant to your niche and location and try to include your site. It doesn't matter if they are free or paid - both can work very well for your site. The more important thing is the quality. If the directory has a strict approval policy and is useful for the users it will be useful for you too.

Watch this video by Mutt Cutts (lead of Google spam team):

Forget directories. Their homepage may have a lot of link juice, but the page on which your link is located is likely to be a low quality page with little or no link juice.

Of course directories still work. Especially if the directory markets to the public as a "go-to" business list. I'd go with the premium (pay monthly/yearly) ones because that tells the user that you're serious about your business and tells Google, et al that you're not just in the game to spam the hell out of it.

I see directories as a traffic source first, then as a way to help rank second.

Only submit to the good directories with that are relevant and have strong editorial guidelines/ checks.

if you are looking for links. do Link exchange with your niche type of websites... its better than directory submissions and of course Citations are best.

I stopped using directories a long time ago. Better focus on social media or creating good quality back links.

True, most web directories are junk, and not worth the time that it takes to submit your site, let alone the submission fee. Of course, it is also true that most blogs aren't worthwhile, and forums, and websites in general.

As for Google penalizing web directories, Google penalized a very small percentage of the truly junk directories that are out there, leaving the majority of them unscathed, and I know of only two reasonably good quality directories that were caught in the crossfire, and one of them has recovered.

A web directory is simply a website, and should be judged for what it is. There are good ones, there are not-so-good ones, and there are really awful ones, the worst of which are merely scams impersonating a web directory.

Can you judge a good website from a bad one? If so, it shouldn't be hard to tell a good web directory from a bad one. We judge websites according to how well they accomplish their mission. If I come across a website whose topic is mongooses, I would attempt to determine whether the site offers useful information about mongooses. Is that information organized reasonably well? Can I find what I am looking for?

The same is true of a web directory. A directory script with a thousand empty categories is not a web directory, but simply a shell, and that accounts for the majority of the really lousy web directories that are on the Internet. Ignore them, as they cannot direct anyone anywhere.

When a web directory has content, does it have useful content, or are its listings mostly spam and low-quality nonsense sites?

Locate the category that corresponds to the topic of your site. How hard was it to find it? If your site were listed on that page, would it be in a good a neighborhood or a bad one? Would the other sites listed on that page be relevant to your own? Don't forget the the relevancy of your back-links is important.

When a web directory is reasonably well organized, and includes links to useful websites, along with titles and descriptions that are fairly well written and informative, that is a good web directory. If there is a category in that directory that is relevant to your site, then it might be a good source of a relevant back-for you, offering, if nothing else, some link diversity.

When a web directory is very well organized, and includes a good number of useful websites, titled and described well, as well as a category that is highly relevant to the topic of your site, that would be a very good home for a link to your site, which may help your site's position in the SERPs as well as providing targeted traffic.

Don't fall for any of those scams that offer to manually submit your site to thousands of high PR web directories upon payment of a fee. First of all, the submissions are almost certain to be automated and the directories your site will be submitted to will be the worst of the worst, since reputable directories won't be accepting submissions from these scams, and there aren't thousands of worthwhile web directories anyhow. Submit your own site, and submit it only to directories that are at least reasonably well organized and maintained, and your site won't be penalized for it.

As for focusing on social media links, it is folly to focus on any one type of link. The search engines, particularly Google, are looking for diversity in the links that you have, and that can include web directories. Niche directories are particularly useful.

I wouldn't even bother to use these directories. After the latest Google updates, it's just a waste of time, and if you do it a lot it might even hurt your site.

Cheers

Directory submission is still a good and effective technique for SEO, just make sure that you select high PR sites for directory submission.