For all practical purposes, yes.
They've gone the way of Squidoo and Hubpages - while they (still) have some PageRank, they give no real link-love (no-follow links) and so are too difficult to submit to in terms of time compared to the benefits you get back.
Next, the best have to be personally reviewed, which means waiting for perhaps a week for it to show up.
Others rightfully look out for PLR articles, but essentially go overboard and request that you only write for them.
Now there are some SEO spammers who are out for backlinks and will use some really noisome spinning programs in order to get a bunch of backlinks. There are a couple of programs out there which will auto-spin your stuff and then auto submit it to a ton of low-quality Article Directories - which ultimately will backfire on them, if it already hasn't.
If you check out the link in that heading, you'll see some figure out about how a person could possibly make article marketing work. You'll see how arduous it is to get anywhere with this stuff. And the only people I hear still touting this are either almost entirely published on article directories or haven't updated their content in several years (Google has moved on, boys.)
Outside of the small communities out there which live on the sites (mostly authors themselves, I imagine, not people who make any serious money from articles) - there just aren't anyone who's all that interested in articles. The sites who do republish articles are content desperate - because there is no SEO benefit in having yet another copy of that article on your site.
And the backlinks you might get from an article reposted on someone else's site are all the same backlink - which Google is now alerting about as another form of spam they are looking for.
How many times does one of their articles show up in a top position? Practically only where there are really, really long-tail niche keywords involved. And this usually means no one runs ads for these as they aren't easily monetized.
Which means they've gone the route of Hubpages and Squidoo. Had to push up quality to extreme limits to avoid a Google slap. And their interfaces require hand editing to ensure no spam-bots can get in.
Sure, they're still around, but hardly ever show up above page 3. Meaning they are going to send you next to nothing for traffic.
Now, when you weigh the point that it takes extra effort to post these articles (meaning it's a helluva lot longer to do - more time investment) and that you can't put links inside the body (except for a few of them), then it's really a waste of time to even put this into your online marketing mix.
This rant is all the result of trying to submit a routine content flow into the very top article directory, only to run up against one of their very picky editors who wouldn't let it go, and kept rejecting this article (which I simply should have abandoned and deleted.) This then put my whole scene on "review" while they decided whether I should be given another "trial" period.
Look, I've written, edited, and published over 4 dozen books. I have at least as many blogs out there. There's a blog I haven't updated in months which still gets over 1,000 visitors a day. On top of that, I've got 7 degrees (FWIW). So don't tell me I don't know how to put a sentence together.
The funny thing is that according to some forums, you don't even have to spin your articles for these Article Directories anymore. Just brashly post to as many as you want under the same name - the ones which will accept them way outnumber the ones which won't. Of course, that won't do you much good SEO-wise, which is what the forum posters pointed out.
In short - other than for vanity publishing - article directories are dead.
They've been replaced by blogs, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, etc.
So what's a prolific author to do? Go where it's easier to get your content posted. Not the article directories - the social media. "They don't care 'nuthin' about no stinkin' grammer."
The king is dead, long live the king.
Biography:
Find out about Dr. Worstell's latest book about how to market online successfully - An Online Sunshine Plan - Book, Blog, Update blog, Website.
Dr. Robert C. Worstell has written, edited, and published over 4 dozen books, numerous articles, whitepapers, videos, podcasts, and sundry other content. You can find all about his books on his Lulu.com bookstore.
His latest efforts are in educating Network Marketers about how to actually make money with MLM. He recommends MLM RockStars' Funded Proposal.
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