A more important point to take into consideration with Free sites vs Galleries - the cost to you for bandwidth.
While the traffic from a link list is much higher quality (just do a search in Google for high value keywords and youll usually see link lists listed first) and converts at a much better rate, the traffic is a lot less than what you would expect from a full blown submission routine with galleries. That means less traffic cost on your end for better results - just makes economic sense
