5 Reasons Why Article Submission Is A Poor SEO Tactic
I was reading Aaron Walls blog the other day and I found the following post:
Do Article Submissions Work for SEO?
I get the feeling that Aaron is not a big fan of using article submission for SEO and neither am I, here are 5 good reasons why article submission is a poor link building tactic and why you should publish your articles on your own site as apposed to article sites:
1/ If you submit the article to an article site and market the article on social media sites, the links will be going to the article site and not your own.
2/ If you submit the article to an article site and it attracts links from other websites, blogs etc. they will be going to the article site and not your own.
3/ If you submit the article to an article site then the search engine traffic will go to the article site, the readers may or may not click the link to your own site.
4/ If your article is great surely you want the readers of your website to be able to read it, if you submit the article to an article site they won’t.
5/ Most article sites are not trusted by the search engines so the links back to your own site will hold little if any weight.
Publishing informative articles on your own website and marketing them on social media and press release sites etc. is a great SEO tactic and the rewards can be plentiful.
Publishing the article on your own site and article sites is a complete waste of time as article sites generally generate very little traffic and only one copy of the article will be counted by the search engines.
Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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July 1st, 2007 71 Comments
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July 15th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Well I do think that article submission is a good help for SEO. Sure it´s not enough to ensure good results but part of a good links mix.
We have made the experience with customer´s site in Germany. It sometimes helped to come on the first page of the results.
So I wouldn´t exclude it totaly!
Laura
July 16th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Hi Laura,
I do use article sites myself sometimes. I keep the best content for my clients sites and submit the boring stuff to article directories. I never use mass submission or anything though, I look for the better directories and I do 1 unique article, per article site.
Article submission is not a bad thing. It is just the way that the majority of webmasters approach it that is bad.
July 25th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Article submission is not the best method for SEO. I wouldn’t submit any of my articles to loads of article directories, where they can be used again.
However, in the past I’ve created video tutorials for Photoshop and linked my tutorials to massive traffic websites, such as Good-tutorials, where I’ve had over a thousand visits per day, this does help with my traffic.
If you are going to create excellent content link it in where you are going to get loads of traffic and loads of backlinks.
August 15th, 2008 at 4:59 am
While all these points are technically correct, they miss a very important point about the context of most article directory submissions. The articles in question might never get seen at all, on a new website. Article marketing is a way to use *trusted* directories (there are a few) to bring traffic (and, yes, backlinks) to a site that otherwise is not getting them.
So in many cases–especially with new or “struggling” websites–the point of “the directory page gets the traffic/readers/links/etc. and your own site,” is moot.
September 1st, 2008 at 3:29 am
Well I have to agree with you on the mass submissions but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that article submission is a poor seo tactic. I’ve had decent success driving traffic to my sites with articles. Hwoever I only submit 1 unique article per directory and I only use a handful of directories. I do feel that article marketing has it’s place but it’s only one part of a bigger overall strategy.
September 11th, 2008 at 8:20 am
@ David: ok, I guess you are right. I saw yesterday a seo in India who proposed on his site Top 10 positions with 500 article submissions. If it was so easy to get on the top of google!
September 16th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Yes spamming the article sites by republishing the same article on loads of sites is bad but i get decent results from posting the same article to 3-4 “good” article sites with decent page rank, with the resource box pointing back to the origional article on my own site, so it can’t be a poor tactic as it works
September 22nd, 2008 at 9:10 pm
There is a case for using ezine articles, the experience with my website which started with links generated from ezines left me with links on thousands of websites but with media and clients contacting me about the articles content.It has its place in combination with other forms of proven SEO .
Good article
September 29th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
David, I’m sorry, but your 5 reasons are completely biased and have failed to highlight the whole point of article syndication as an SEO technique.
It’s not about getting article directory pages indexed in search engines. It’s not about getting links to article directories. It’s not about getting traffic from article directories. Furthermore, it’s not about giving away your best content (of course this should be kept for your own site).
Article syndication is a link building technique.
For anyone that doesn’t understand how article syndication creates back-links, the process is:
1. Submit article (containing links to your site) to an article directory
2. Publishers looking for content (including automated content discovery bots) find your article
3. Publishers republish your article (hopefully with links intact) on their website
4. Each republication is a new back-link from a unique domain
Simple…of course there are lots of duplicate content issues, and the links are usually low-quality…article syndication is never going to create high quality back-links.
September 29th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Thanks for the information David. From past 3 months I have been writing articles and submitting the articles to article directories thinking that, it may build links to my website. From now I will try not to submit website to article directories.
September 29th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Thanks for the information dude. I will try to write articles to my own website now.
September 29th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
David is it better to place all my previous articles which I wrote before back to my website.
October 8th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
IMO – If you have already submitted them you should probably just leave them and start making new ones for your site.
October 10th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Yes spamming the article sites by republishing the same article on loads of sites is bad but i get decent results from posting the same article to 3-4 “good” article sites with decent page rank,
October 27th, 2008 at 5:08 am
i agree ,wid u completely, i had many article directories, atleast 20, and i didnt get any traffic at all ,luckily i find commenting in blogs like this can .
hahaha…..
October 31st, 2008 at 11:15 am
Agree with Groupmind. Its not been about getting traffic – its very rare for articles on ezines to bring in large amounts of traffic, but a good article may be taken and used on a hundred other websites creating a lot of backlinks and being an excellent seo tactic
November 6th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
I believe article submissions is just another bean in the bag for SEO masters. Another tool that we can not live without and I think you need to do more research on how to optimize your articles to work for you.
That’s my 5 cents.
November 14th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
does anyone have an opinion on articlemarketer.com ?
November 15th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Surely if I use submission software to keep submitting the same article, google will penalise the articles for duplicate content? Or am I missing something?
November 17th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
I think it’s a good idea to publish articles – I use them to post in places that wouldn’t ordinarily get seen by my potential customers – for example I posted an article about my technical training courses in subject about the economy – a guy who had just been made redundant cause his company had gone bust in the recession has booked to come on my course and retrain! He would have never found me via a search engine as he wasn’t looking..
November 24th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
I think the idea of the social media has a much better attention rate for articles especially if your friends can relate and agree on the article or if they don’t then it sparks conversation regarding the article topic.
Article sites are all well and good but there are just too many of them and they all have very similar content, not everyone has time to read the shear volume of articles that go up on those sites.
Article sites still have their place but your right on wanting to hog the limelight for your own site, especially if you have put some effort into your articles and creating benefits for the readers
December 4th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
Thanks for the info. However, I think its a bit biased. Naturally, you should also use this tactic as part of a wider strategy.
December 6th, 2008 at 4:57 am
The author of this article leaves me wondering about their credibility since checking this site and a few article submissions sites; I found the page rank on Google to be as high or higher…. Hmmmmm I guess an SEO expert doesn’t like competition!
December 10th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
I’ve been hot and cold about article marketing and, especially, mass distribution over the last few years. Currently we use Articlemarketer. If nothing else it is valuable because it distributes to EzineArticles and a few of the other good sites. I see these articles come up in searches all the time.
In my opinion it doesn’t matter whether a “good” article is on your site or on an article site. A read is a read. And you’ll usually get a lot more of those on selected sites.
Choosing niche sites that get a lot of traffic is also a good tactic. I get the impression that not many people do this anymore (approaching webmasters and asking them if they are interested in publishing their articles).
I think it would be better to try to forge a relationship with a specific webmaster where you could submit articles on a regular basis. The content would have to be (relatively) unique, and targeted specifically to that web’s viewer base. For example, if someone was to approach me and say “I have these SEO (or traffic generating or link building or list building) articles. Would you be interested in publishing them on your site?” why would I say no?
I suppose the problem is that most writers or bloggers with good traffic may not be interested in this kind of arrangement. Not sure why…
December 13th, 2008 at 1:54 am
Hi David,
I completely agree with you for not to submit article directories with your five reasons mentioned.
I disagree with Group mind who mentioned above that article submitting to article directories are useful.He is right for link building but most of links coming from bad sites or PR O web sites will be very harmful for a web site also.
December 13th, 2008 at 2:14 am
Also,I should mention that sometimes to submit one article to a few article directories-not more than 2 or three article directories–may be useful to provide link building but it is very harmful to submit the same article to hundreds of article directories.This is a spam from the view of Google.
Sorry,my native language is not English…
December 31st, 2008 at 6:58 pm
I think many people are more looking for relevent back links as appose to real traffic?
January 4th, 2009 at 11:19 am
I think article submission is one of the good ways of generating both backlinks and real traffic however submitting the same article to more than one site decreases its value. So, I think submission of unique text to different article sites is a much better option then to simply submit a single article to loads of diretories.
January 5th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
David,
I think that article marketing still has its place in seo, as you said you still actually submit to a few article sites yourself. But when you say that only one copy of the article will be counted by the engines, who cares? As long as the articles are being indexed and the links are being counted, who gives a c**p about the rankings of the article? I know I sure don’t.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:40 pm
I submit to 945 article directories, working 12 hours a day, and it gets me tons of backlinks that have almost no value. But since I enjoy wasting my time, I continue to do it quite faithfully. Sometimes I go on Wikipedia and edit their most popular results to include plugs for my own website. I spend about 3 hours a day doing that. Then, sometimes, late at night, I sit up thinking about how tedious and boring my life as an SEO has become. I often fantasize about what it would be like to have a real job, contributing to society in some way.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
But what if nobody knows about my site???
January 12th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
Personally, I prefer to create 100000000 myspace profiles of bikini models, which I use to bait unsuspecting profile browsers into clicking on fake YouTube video JPEGS of a woman about to remove her top. It gets me 10000000 hits a day, but none of the clicks convert for some reason. I’m selling car insurance.
January 17th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
It is hard to believe that article submission is not a good seo technique. Plus and Minus are there but no good seo will exclude articles submission – it is a good link mix.
But yes publishing articles on site is a better idea.
January 19th, 2009 at 12:39 am
Hi,
Bit of a newbie to the whole article submission but thanks for the tips!
January 28th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Well i have to say i disagree. Mainly because people submit articles for the sake of a link back from a very respected website more than attracting visitors with the article. So it’s not the traffic from the article site people are interested in, it’s the link back with the anchor text to increase serps and pr. I would say i understand what you’re saying to a certain extent but there are enough quality article websites out there where the link back would be of use and contain weight. So submitting to the right article websites is worth it, submitting a quality article to a poor ranked article site is a waste.
February 5th, 2009 at 10:00 am
I am surprised by this article. thanks anyway
February 10th, 2009 at 6:56 am
Articles also play some part in internet marketing. As articles are read by visitors there are more chances for visitors coming to the sites. Articles should be relevant to the theme of the site
February 16th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
I just did submit an article (slight variation of the original article which was already published on my site) and it did work for me. I managed to jump two places up in google.
But i still agree what you say about mass submission, I am against that.
February 17th, 2009 at 9:12 am
I wont ever mass submit my article or outsource it to a company and not know where they will post it. But it works for a lot of people if written precisely, related to your content.
February 20th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Hmmm… So I guess that means that we should buy one way links on un-related sites to boost our page rank? Like an SEO site buying links on Travel and Hotel and Property Investment sites?
February 22nd, 2009 at 10:17 pm
It is hard to believe that article submission is not a good seo technique. Plus and Minus are there but no good seo will exclude articles submission – it is a good link mix.
But yes publishing articles on site is a better idea.
February 24th, 2009 at 8:34 am
Thanks!
Its a very great reasons…..
March 1st, 2009 at 2:24 am
Hi,
I was surfing and saw this discussion. To a newbie like myself it’s all very cofusing. I just built my site to resell a video tutorial I bought which I found really helpful. In fact it is what helped me to build the site Now I’m trying to figure out how to get traffic to it. From all I’ve read here it would seem as if the general concensus is that submitting to article directories may not be the best way especially for someone who has no traffic. What’s a newbie to do?
March 5th, 2009 at 10:56 am
You might be right that massive article submission isn’t worth much, and i completely agree that google does count the first url for the original article and tends to exclude the rest from the search results as it’s duplicate. Thank you for the kind advice.
March 6th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
I think this is an excellent article. Anyone got any more info about it?
March 9th, 2009 at 1:11 am
Interesting Read !!
This issue is arguable but the article submission is surely one of the top 10 steps used in the SEO market.
March 11th, 2009 at 8:18 am
I think the five perspectives are good.
March 31st, 2009 at 1:04 am
Thanks for the great advice. I have read about 1000 article submission here and there for SEO, but now I am convinced that it is useless.
April 6th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
I use article marketing interspersed with other forms of backlink building such as forum posting and blog commenting. Did ou know that when replying to a blog post (such as this one) that the ‘name’ field is actually anchor text? So Russ (for example) don’t leave your name, use the name field as your anchor text like a few have done here in reply to the original post
April 10th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
How do you stop someone else from hijacking the article? Any advice?
Happened to me once and that was the first and last article I submitted.
April 14th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
@Parker fountain pen, here is a link to an article I wrote last year:
http://www.articlealley.com/article_538648_62.html
April 21st, 2009 at 10:03 pm
I guess it all depends on the article content and where you are submitting it to. If it’s a trusted source you can highlight and link the keyword/keyphrase you are targetting and this does work in the same way as link building.
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:19 pm
so true, i only submit to get backlinks not traffic
April 27th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
I try to restrict content on my website to less than 600 words so that it’s informative and usefull with every word. To do this i write everything i want to say, then take half of it out, leaving only the best content. It’s too hard to delete, so I bundle it into coherent articles that tend to consist mostly of reasons why the main website content is usefull. These make great articles that advertise the main site but do not infringe upon it’s content.
I am considering writing a poor quality article and submitting it to 100’s of directories, as I do the same for 0 Prank web directories just for an easy backlink – what’s the difference? Google won’t punish me for duplicate content that links to me, so long as it’s not reprinted on my own site.
April 27th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Article Submission
I think that we submit our precious articles to get some links. High PR article directories are often crawled and have a credibility over the search engines like ezinearticles, so if we have a link there, it will also be seen by these bots. So making a visibility make us popular in some extent. Am I right?
April 29th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Thanks for this info! There’s so much conflicting info out there…
May 4th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
I really thanks for the information. But I have still quarry with out back link how is possible to get good PR? Onw way link is very costly and by Article Submission can easily get Back link.
May 13th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Also you forgot to mention this important thing that once you have published the content on the article site, it becomes their property and they can resuse that article. So Be very cautious in submitting articles to sites.
May 13th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
As I see, article submission is still the best way to get one way backlinks!
May 23rd, 2009 at 3:06 pm
i dont think article submission is something to be away. But i prefer to get real links from real websites.
May 27th, 2009 at 8:00 am
so true, i only submit to get backlinks not traffic
May 27th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
if you had 100 pound to spend, where is it best to put your efforts? Articles, Directories, Social or all of the above?
May 31st, 2009 at 10:03 pm
I have submitted articles related to my subject of PAT testing, and found that the article pages have achieved a PR of 3 or 4 quite quickly. I think that means that the link is valuable. However, I’m not convinced that google values them. I have had a few bookings on PAT testing courses that have arisen directly from people reading the articles – In one case somebody had obviously typed a very obscure search query (about fuses in BS1363 plugs) into google and had come across my article about PAT testing courses. He signed up to the email newsletter and a couple of days later booked onto a course. So, yes, Article submission does work!
June 15th, 2009 at 8:20 am
thanks for your posting this article. that article useful
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June 22nd, 2009 at 7:29 am
Well Article submission is a good strategy in my opinion if you know what you are doing, utilizing it the right way can result in automatic link backs to your website.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Thanks!You made some good points there.
Thanks though, i’m glad some people share good stuff like this! It will greatly help me in my SEO activities.
June 24th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Hi,
I am completely agree with your points. Well Describe..
thanks
June 24th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
I don’t know, personally article submissions helped me push my page up. I am not saying its perfect but its one of those things that cannot hurt.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
I have had a few articles submitted to Ezinearticles and it worked very well with the off site page optimization, unfortunately, this is no longer the case, I wonder if when some more articles are submitted (unique and on a regular basis), my site would regain the 1st page place?
June 27th, 2009 at 2:53 am
I have a website that ranks on the first page of Google
internationally for a keyword with over 15 million other sites in competition, I did this using ONLY article marketing. Article marketing has come a long way, If you click my Link you will be take to a website called fts (its free to use) which allows you to post one article to 30 blogs at the click of a button, the system allows spining of articles which means it uses synonyms to change certian words in the article, so you get no duplicate content penalties, try it, it works.