In order to rank high on Google we all need to have links pointing at our content. How we get these links is another matter entirely and it requires a great deal of creativity and investment.
Article marketing is a very popular linking technique, write and article and then point an anchor text link back to your content. This works but not how you would expect as it has one fundamental flaw.
Article marketing was a great way of boosting your google seo campaign a few years ago but in todays market you need to think outside the box. You see the problem with article marketing is that you are distributing a duplicate article across the web on thousands of directories, so what the issue?
A common online fallacy is that every link you build counts, this is not the case and only a link on an indexed page is worth anything and if you have published a hundred article Google is only going to index a few. What Google will do is index the article from the most authoritative domain, in my opinion there are only 4 or article directories online with this pedigree.
So use article directories but only the best ones, the ones where you know your article and link will be listed and indexed.