I'm sure its been asked a million times here, but I'll risk asking again. When you submit an article to those article submission sites where other webmasters can come and pluck your aticle to add content to their own site, how many will actually leave your link at the bottom of the article? And then, what results do you actually get? Do you notice a change in number of visitors? And for how long do continue to notice a rise, if any, in visitors? .
Not sure if people leave or not your link to your site, and some articles sites publish your url but the software used do not convert it to hyperlink. Some webmasters may grab your script and leave the url but disable the hyperlink if exist or just make it open in a new windows. The fact is that your name and that of your website (including the url, if left) will be crawled by Search Engines, boosting your internet presence, btw, I have on my referrral logs incoming visitors from articles written by me published elsewhere.
I'd probably say at least a third have the links removed, un-hyperlinked, or with nofollow tags. But, it's still worth it.