So many bad article directories out there!

Keen to submit articles to a wide variety of directories so that I have a greater range of locations for backlinks to my sites, I've been doing a lot of Googling for new ones. I've joined a few of the ones I've found and submitted some articles. But it's hard going because there are many bad article directories out there. They're duds for various reasons.

Firstly, there often seem to be software or formatting issues. You submit the article, and it doesn't go through. Or it seems to, but then you go back to your dashboard to preview and edit the article and it's not there. Or it is there but nothing comes up when you click on the relevant icon.

Then there's the problem of having signed up and logged in once, but then not being able to do so again!

The third problem is when you submit a perfectly good article but automatic notifications come up telling you that you need to break up your paragraphs more or making other suggestions that never seem to be good enough.

But by far the most common problem is that many article directories say that they will approve your article (or reject it) within a certain time period (it's often 72 hours) but it's still on pending more than a week after you submitted it! I realize that this is often the result of people being overworked but it's still annoying. It would be nice if the webmasters running these directories were a bit more honest about the time it takes to review articles.

That said, I think there are quite a few such webmasters who will never look at those new articles submitted. They've pretty much forgotten that the directory is even there and have left it as it was sometimes even years before, still calling for submissions. They just leave these directories up there because they're still making money from Adsense or whatever.

Whatever the reasons for such bad article directories, there are an awful lot of them. Unfortunately there is no way of knowing just how bad (or good) they are unless you try them out.