Google" has no idea and doesn't "care" how many or how quickly you submit to directories.
Do you think they monitor every submission form on every directory out there or something??

They do not monitor every submission form on every directory however they do have very advanced algorithims and can see trends and such. I have had first hand experience. I wanted a keyword so I did about 130 directory submissions all with the same anchor text. Within the next week I reached 3 for the keyword and then after about a day went to like page 30. I should definitely be at least on the third page without backlinks for that keyword.

This is proof enough to me that repeated anchor text and too many links in too little time will show the SEs that your links are not natural links. I think they are smart enough to realize that it is very unlikely for 100 people to all link to my site within a day or two on a week old domain with the same exact anchor text.

Well, I think directory submission does help to bring minimum but targeted traffic and also increase PageRank. For that you have to choose directories very carefully.
Some directories are very good for traffic. Its all about off-the-page SEO so gotta start from something.

some directories like dmoz really affect your PR, but are incredibly hard to get into.

Originally Posted by johniman7

They do not monitor every submission form on every directory however they do have very advanced algorithims and can see trends and such. I have had first hand experience. I wanted a keyword so I did about 130 directory submissions all with the same anchor text. Within the next week I reached 3 for the keyword and then after about a day went to like page 30. I should definitely be at least on the third page without backlinks for that keyword.

And were all the submissions live on the same day??

Originally Posted by johniman7

This is proof enough to me that repeated anchor text and too many links in too little time will show the SEs that your links are not natural links. I think they are smart enough to realize that it is very unlikely for 100 people to all link to my site within a day or two on a week old domain with the same exact anchor text.

Actually it's more a demonstration that "rankings" fluctuate very often.
Also, newly discovered pages/sites always appear high on page one initially, sometimes for a few days sometimes for a couple of weeks. This has been the case since the dawn of (Google) time.
If you happened to time it right, back in the days of the monthly "Google Dance", you could have a site that was only a few days old at No1 for three weeks.

The links were not all live the first day but they were within about a week which is still a pretty short amount of time.

Also, newly discovered pages/sites always appear high on page one initially, sometimes for a few days sometimes for a couple of weeks. This has been the case since the dawn of (Google) time.
If you happened to time it right, back in the days of the monthly "Google Dance", you could have a site that was only a few days old at No1 for three weeks.

This is true I have noticed it with other sites so good point there.

The links were not all live the first day but they were within about a week which is still a pretty short amount of time

Not for 100 or so links, a half decent blog post by someone interesting could get 100 genuine links in a matter of minutes.

Now, if you were talking about 1,000,000 links in a few days it might raise some kind of warning.
With all the forum/blog scrapers and republisher bots around, a new thread on a popular forum or blog could get 50,000 backlinks in seconds.

You all think far too small, When you are talking about Google sized software engineering you have to think big!
In billions of indexed web pages, a few hundred new links to one particular page is NOT a significant factor for concern over their validity.

Directory generates very little useful traffic. This is due to the fact that the amount of people that actually use the directory is dismal but the free ones, certainly worth a shot.