Hey... I got near the top with $0! Just have been putting TONS of time into it.... we're talking 8 hours a day minimum since January of this year....... but itll pay off soon.... !! And any link juice helps! Also one other thing.... I realized, all of my Goarticles.com articles got deleted!! They were all unique and up to standards..... I wonder what happened?!
You better rephrase your original article then submit it to each and every article directory with different rephrase version.
Articles are being a counted by Google, I have lots of incoming links showing in Goog webmaster tools from them.
Google is not ignoring article directories, the article gets devalued for duplicate content therefore google will not show you all the sites that your articles have been published on. Google likes unique articles so you should keep on publishing your articles.
I have submitted about 200 articles to different sites. At first, I used to submit to 100+ directories. But then I found out that google was only counting backlinks from about 15 or so directories. After that, I only submit to 15 directories. Even in these directories, google do not count backlinks from all the articles as of the duplicate reason.