Human edited directories are likely to be of far more use from an SEO perspective than automated directories, and thus probably more usable with a higher volume of traffic than lower quality directories.

The issue of a ‘natural’ link is not so much dependant on the requirement that someone finds your site out of the blue and links to it without any prior knowledge, but that someone actively chooses to link to your site without any additional influencers. If you happened to tell them about your site in a conversation, in an email or whatever is immaterial.

This is however skewed by reciprocal links which encourage backlinks on a tit-for-tat basis. By nature these are therefore biased towards seo away from quality content, and hence are not weighted nearly as heavily by the search engines.

great comment Elishua! Thanks

Then again, if a topically-relevant website decides to honor my link request, I suppose that link is essentially not natural either…since they had to be prompted to consider the link in the first place, but at least Google wouldn’t have knowledge of the request (unless it’s a reciprocal).

I feel like I know less and less about this stuff every day