Is Submitting Articles a Waste of Time?

[dsouza]

Huy guys and gals - can you all tell me your opinion. Is writing and submitting articles to hundreds of article directories a waste of time? I have been writng a few travel articles and submitting them to try to boost my visitors and backlinks but now seem to have got into problems with Google supplemental results even some new original content I have written for my site (and not published elsewhere) has been dumped into the supplementals. I have studied some of the people who submit hundreds of articles (top authors on the article sites) to hundreds of sites (they must use some submission software as they have tens of thousands of articles published)and I have checked the backlinks to their websites and they don't seem to have any (or at least very few), so what are all those articles achieving? I am now writing separate articles for submitting and considering only posting them on one top site so at least I get one decent link, but then of course others use the article and it becomes duplicate content once again.