Best Article Directories? (Newbie)

Ezine would be the answer, maybe Articlesbase.

My favorite is GA as they're autoapprove.

It varies from niche to niche, and depends partly on how good your keyword research is.

Depending on article directories for traffic is an unwise course of action, to put it mildly, in my opinion.

Article directory backlinks are all non-context-relevant, PR-0 backlinks (regardless of the page rank of the directories' home pages, which are not where one's articles are published, of course). One would typically need something between 50,000 and 100,000 of them to confer the link-juice equivalent to one backlink from a relevant authority site. (At least, that's what all the books seem to say: I'd actually put the figure quite a bit higher, myself).

So, as far as traffic and backlinks are concerned, it really doesn't matter very much which ones you use, among the main, well-known directories. And after Google's recent algorithm change (the "Panda update") that's even more true now than ever before ... but it's actually been so for at least a couple of years, anyway.

I've had overwhelmingly more syndication - in each of 8 unrelated niches - from EZA than from all the other articles directories I've ever used, added together.

When a potential customer finds one of your articles by typing one of its keywords into a search engine, you might want to make quite sure that the copy of the article he finds is the one on your own site, and not one in an article directory. That's easily done, in the long run. It's very important, for all the reasons explained in detail in this thread (by a whole succession of professional article marketers) to publish your articles on your own site first and have them indexed there, before submitting them anywhere else.

ArticlesBase is also ok, but in my opinion way behind EZA.

GoArticles rather less so, because they autoapprove (which is, obviously enough, another way of saying that it's full of junk ... and that, in turn, understandably, is another way of saying that not many people syndicate articles from there).

article directories dont seem to rank at all now a days. the panda update pretty much killed "mega niche, multi catagory" typee sites.

qondio.com PR7
ezinearticles.com PR6
buzzle.com PR6
articlecity.com PR6
articledashboard.com PR5

(All DoFollow)

Article directories are, well, OK. Even the king EZA, pales GREATLY in comparison to some solid, out-of-the-box SEO. If you know what you are doing, I would focus on creating quality content and focusing on building backlinks to it.

Personally, it is looking like niche guest posting is the way of the future. Contextual links of course. Forum links, article directory links, are almost worthless at this point.

SEO has put some of my sites on steroids. Post Panda, EZA has discontinued most of what put it at the top. I have stopped submitting there...simply because there are more SEO-beneficial and more profitable things to do with my content.

The directory's PR has no bearing on the page displaying your article which will have a PR0.

Absolutely right. You should now be creating very high quality articles for syndication purposes, and this should be secondary to their first being published on your own site/blog with good, broad-based backlinking.

As pointed out, guest posting can provide excellent results

Ezine / articlebase imo

Ezine and Articlesbase are both good.