top 10 article directories?

Be careful about trying to acquire links in the same places many other people are doing the same thing. Often google especially does not like links that were placed there without an editorial review, so seeking the easiest places to get a link also means an increasing possibility your work will be for nothing and you get an unnatural linking penalty.

Here is 50 of them:

List Of Top 50 Article Directories By Traffic, PageRank

my suggestion use a mix of 2.0 and article dir.

Alas, no.

Contrary to the entirely mistaken heading on that list, many of those are not article directories at all. (Only two of the top ten on that list are actually article directories).

Some of them no longer exist.

Some of the ones that call themselves "article directories" allow no external links at all, not even in a resource-box.

HubPages is not an article directory.

Your question isn't a helpful one for you, I'm sorry to say, because it's based on incorrect assumptions.

Article directories are websites, and websites don't "have page ranks". Only pages have page ranks.

The backlinks you'll get from all of them, regardless of the page ranks of their own home pages (which are what you're actually referring to), will be non-context-relevant PR-0 backlinks, because you articles aren't published on their own home pages but on newly formed pages without a page rank, just as they would be on your own website. Don't imagine that Ezine Articles will give you a good backlink just because EZA's own home page is PR-6: that isn't how it works.

Also, don't assume that no-follow links aren't worth having. People who have already decided that "no-follow" backlinks are not so good for SEO may not be interested, but others who are a little more open-minded will find many threads here explaining/discussing interesting things about no-follow links: this one might start you off, and then there's more here, here, here, here, here, and so on.

This thread will enlighten you about article directories, and save you from all the unprofitable time and trouble of trying to use them for hoped-for benefits which they can't, in reality, provide at all (they do have some potential benefits, or at least Ezine Articles does - but just not the ones you're looking for, and their potential benefits have nothing at all to do with either page ranks or no/do-follow): http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5068872

I don't know how much Warrior Forum is paying Alexa but she deserves a raise for answers like this one!