5 Reasons Why Article Submission Is A Poor SEO Tactic
I was reading Aaron Wall’s 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 best articles on your own site as opposed 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.
26/07/09 Update: This article has been so popular that I have decided to update it for you all and add some extra information about how to do article submission properly and where to submit to. I still stand by all 5 of my reasons.
How to do article submission properly
1/ Don’t post anything really decent that stands a chance of getting links to an article directory, publish the good stuff on your own site in a blog or articles category and publish all of your OK articles on article directories.
2/ Don’t publish any of your articles in more then 1 place. This one rule will help you on so many different levels with SEO. If someone re-publishes your article then that’s fine, but don’t go out of your way to get an article published twice, only one copy will rank in the search engines and pass weight to your site.
3/ Make sure the article directory you are submitting to provides dofollow links and add a keyword text link or two to your author signature, my ones usually come out looking something like this:
“David Eaves knows a lot about search engine optimisation, more of his articles can be found at his SEO news blog.”
Generally speaking you should not add links to your pages in the main content area – Ezine Articles and quite a few others nofollow these links so they won’t pass weight there, plus your article will probably come off as being less professional because you will have plugged yourself. The only time this is OK is if you are linking to something that genuinely ads value to your article, like what you can see by viewing the article below:
How To Get Traffic And Links To Your Blog
4/ Don’t go mad with it, if you are trying to SEO a regular site like this one, then 1 per month is more then enough. If you have a huge holiday website or something with lots of categories to rank, then maybe do one a week, any more time then that spent on it will be wasted.
5/ Use the very best article directories that you can get published at and never submit more then two articles to each one, once you have a couple of links from an article directory don’t use it again, find new ones because the links will count more. Here are links to my top 4 general article directories to get you started:
You can find out more information about the sites listed above by reading our new post about top article directories.
You should also search for article directories in your niche, there are some amazing ones for SEO such as WebProNews, Sitepoint and Webcredible.
Happy hunting!
Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
If you enjoyed this post why not subscribe to the RSS feed.
July 1st, 2007 143 Comments
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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
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.
July 13th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
its good for driving traffic to your website but with the number of articles that are published it day,you have to make sure yours is one of the best to get any attention.
July 17th, 2009 at 10:04 am
I have never done article submission b4 but recently i started doing it and have realised i have got some backlinks from those article directories for one of my sites so i guess it can’t be that bad.
July 17th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
its good for driving traffic to your website but with the number of articles that are published it day,you have to make sure yours is one of the best to get any attention.
your
July 23rd, 2009 at 3:54 am
If all you do is deploying articles on your website, you will not be pleased with your PR down the road, because it will stay at 0 !
Article syndication is a Link Building Campaign. Yes, you should leave the best content for your website, but you cannot afford to ignore the link development since thus far, it is the factor in PR algorithm. Having said that, article syndication should be just one of the link building campaigns a webmaster should undertake.
July 25th, 2009 at 4:25 am
I think I get it.
Article submission is a bit like eating red meat.
Good for you, if done in moderation.
July 25th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
@essay guy, nice metaphor, the meat needs to be cooked properly as well sir.
July 27th, 2009 at 2:31 am
SUPER information! I write many articles for clients, but most never publish more than one per week to article directories, and actually use them on their own site or blog. Nice to know that we are doing things correctly.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Wow… I’ve known about article marketing for a long time but never had the time to really delve into it. There are some real conflicting opinions of whether submissions work or not. Now I’m not sure whether to put my efforts into this method or not.. (sigh).
August 8th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
I think article marketing is a helpful SEO link building tactic if used in combination with other SEO linkbuilding methods. Duplicate content is an issue with Google, however, Yahoo and MSN seem to accept duplicate content links without issue.
Submitting variations of the same article to different article directories helps ensure that you minimize duplicate content issues.
Backlinks from article directories themselves may not be that useful, however, if lots of other sites republish your article, it should give your site a boost in the rankings.
August 11th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Thanks for this. I was about to use a multiple article submission software, but having read this i will reconsider.
September 16th, 2009 at 1:07 am
You can defiantly benefit from article submissions if you know the right websites to submit. Some of them has very poor link value.
September 19th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
I quite accept your article truth. It only help seo websites and not you. I think we should do other things well too.
http://www.bucaj.com
October 10th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
I am not counting on one seo technique, but trying to do many things that will help my client ranking on specific keywords. In that context, I am planning to do article submissions, but if it does not do any good, then why do it at all? I was going to use a service that will send an article out to 300 directories and spin each article. I was thinking of doing this once a month. The cost is less then $50. Is this worth it? or not?
And what constitutes duplicate content? Spinning an article enough? What percentage must be different?
Has anyone found a good article submission software that also will rewrite or spin the document each time it is sent out to a new directly?
Any insite will helpful.
October 11th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
I’ve been wanting to do article submission forever, and am finally getting ready to do it; now I’m not sure if I should bother. My main purpose for wanting to do it at this time is to generate traffic; I don’t give a hoot about ranking at this point. Can anyone tell me good ways to get lots of traffic with little time and expense? Thank you!
October 12th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
I have found that article submission is great for letting search engines to trail back to your website and build SEO rank. It’s working with my website
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:49 am
Thats a good write up.But its isn’t clear as to if you are promoting the article submissions or is it vice-versa.
IMO article submissions have been an effective way of SEO and most of the SEO experts have been using this technique to promote the website/s.Plus IMO most of the article submission websites offer a do-follow backlink,hence is useful from SEO point of view.
October 26th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
i don’t think it’s poor link building tactic, i agree it’s not very effective but it can help in link building and the good thing about article submission is that links are pertinent.
November 16th, 2009 at 7:46 am
Thanks for this. I was about to use a multiple article submission software, but having read this i will reconsider.
November 17th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Thanks for this opinion. I’ve seen a variety of views on the topic of article marketing – some which say that submitting to many ‘decent’ sites is the best tactic. I’ve been submitting to about 6 different sites but I think after reading this advice I will stick to about 2/3 in the future.
November 21st, 2009 at 11:25 pm
What a load of c***
Article marketing works perfectly well otherwise it would be so flippin popular lol
November 22nd, 2009 at 7:42 am
Thanks for your good information. My company website is toward the top of Google page 1 and I have found that it takes a lot of variety of inbound links to keep it there. Although fairly new to the SEO game, I have found that single submissions to “Quality” article directories is one successful SEO practice, especially for websites that have a low PR. I suspect that the higher the PR of a website, the greater success it will achieve with publishing articles on its own url. What do you think?
November 25th, 2009 at 10:41 am
Thanks for the tip.
Like a lot of people said though, I just feel article publishing is a way of getting backlinks to one’s site. I wont call it one of the top SEO to-do-list but it definitely does help.
And definitely publish it first on your own website unless its not related to it..
November 26th, 2009 at 2:20 am
I’m sorry, but this article is just completely biased and uninformed. Article marketing is a fantastic way to build backlinks to your website and thus increase its rankings in the search engines. I regularly submit any article I write to about 450 directories. There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty for stuff like this. Don’t believe the people who continue to misinform you about this myth. If there was a duplicate content penalty from Google, then what would happen to all those syndicated columns out there? What about every article that is written by the Associated Press and picked up by the NY Times, Washington Post, and 1000’s of other newspapers?
There also is nothing wrong with having an article submitted to article directories and having the article on your site. Some people choose to write two versions. That’s fine too.
The only thing I ever do differently is that I’ll spin the anchor text to whatever website I am promoting in order to target different keywords.
There is no need to limit yourself to 2-3 directories. If you find an article directory, submit to it. Or get a good piece of software that does the submissions for you like I have.
November 26th, 2009 at 2:28 am
And by the way, here is one of the best threads you will ever find on article marketing. They should charge people to read this.
http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/95391-article-site-eza-first.html
December 15th, 2009 at 7:51 am
i agree it’s not very effective but it can help in link building and the good thing about article submission is that links are pertinent.
December 21st, 2009 at 2:16 am
I have recently put together a website on bodybuilding to try and sell some bodybuilding programs, but the competition out there for any of those types of word phrases is rediculous. I’m not really thay bothered about getting a good page rank or loads of backlinks, just want to try and make some money quickly by selling these programs. Because of the compitition, I was hoping to submit a few articles to 100’s of article sites and in return hopefully just make some sales.
Can anyone give me any advise on this before I do it? I’m new to affiliate marketing. Well I have been trying for some months now, but have never made a penny, even though I do spend a lot of time and effort trying.
December 23rd, 2009 at 2:32 pm
If you wrote a useful article why would you waste it by publishing on other’s websites? I totally agree with you.
January 6th, 2010 at 10:34 am
after reading all this, i am gonna use article submission software anyway. my site is brand new with PR0 so i dont think i have anything to lose
January 8th, 2010 at 4:43 pm
My website, which I started in 2004, for my domestic machine repair business, and then in about 2006 I submitted a machine trouble shooting article (only the one) to ezinearticles.com. Then I pretty well forgot about it.
It wasn’t until I ran SEOmoz’s Linkscape tool that I discovered that the article had been re-published in 13 (I knew I had some but not that many) other article directories and ezine websites but not a linkback from ezinearticles.com themselves which puzzled me a lot. But then reading your piece on ezine article submission (and the reasons against them), you mentioned about the link going to to the ezine website from Google but my link not going back to my site. BUT I am getting linkjuice from the OTHER article directories. So, to me, that proves the point.
Thanks for your help, a lot of useful information.
Regards Jeff
January 11th, 2010 at 10:05 pm
I have always suspected this! I heard somewhere that article directories don’t provide much juicy links.
January 13th, 2010 at 7:46 am
Article submission is one of the finest way to promote content and website online amongst different users worldwide. Its really effective SEO trick.
January 13th, 2010 at 9:22 pm
I believe this marketing methods is one of the best.
If you only submit to the top 10-25 sites.
Submitting articles in excess of 50 pages with no pr with penalize you.
January 21st, 2010 at 9:35 am
I believe this marketing methods is one of the best.
If you only submit to the top 10-25 sites.
Submitting articles in excess of 50 pages with no pr with penalize you.
January 21st, 2010 at 11:17 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.
January 21st, 2010 at 2:31 pm
I have never submited any article. About a week ago i was very close to it but changed my mind. I doupt that it would be part of seo, but the online marketing. If your site is not strong enough to provide real visitors by search engine hits, article submission may provide some linkbaiting opportunity.
February 10th, 2010 at 9:31 am
I often submit my articles from my blog to ezine and articlebase, i found out that some visitors came from ezine to my blog. its not really that effective but it helps a little, i dont submit every article to every article submission site coz its a hassle and not too many visitors click on my articles.
Ways to Invest Money
February 11th, 2010 at 10:00 am
Article submissions ARE good for seo. No idea why this person thinks they aren’t. When other blogs and sites host your article they link back to the article on the article directory and that article then gets more weight and juice, and then that article passes it back to YOUR site. Try linking different articles to one another, put google alerts on your articles and contact webmasters directly when they host your article. Offer to give them a unique article with a link back. They usually agree.
I agree that these are 4 of the better directories. Especially ezine articles and buzzle. Many of the other directories out there are very weak and often your articles don’t get indexed on them. You can help them get indexed by linking to them from ezine articles and buzzle for example. Some directories decide to nofollow links like articlebase.com – which is why I stopped using them. For some reason they expect people to carry on submitting to them. Unfortunately most people don’t know they now nofollow (I think they always nofollowed but done something crafty with the links so nofollow tools didn’t mark them as nofollowed). Once they got enough articles and awareness to make good money from advertising they then nofollowed all outgoing links! I wish everyone would take their articles down from sites like them. Not a nice way to treat your users. It’s the users that made the site in the first place. Rant over
February 12th, 2010 at 1:13 pm
Article Submission is not so bad as its really consuming your knowledge. But its really takes some information and fresh content to deliver it to other websites and it look like what readers wants to read from your article. nice info
February 15th, 2010 at 9:40 am
My experience so far with article submission is the high level of content rip off. A few months back I submitted an article to Ezine, did a search on my content and found a few sites that had just taken the body text and used it as their own. No links, just plagiarism.
I’m now becoming a fan of guest authoring as it is also a good method of controlled back links and targetted traffic if you get the right sites.
March 1st, 2010 at 3:13 pm
Thanks for the info. I was about to submit 300 articles about my photo on canvas business. Lesson learned.
March 2nd, 2010 at 11:15 am
Article submissions work to an extend. It has to be kept in moderation. Here at Cyprus Paradise we provide North Cyprus Holidays and post article on north cyprus holidays on a monthly basis. We get decent amount of traffic and backlinks.
Shouldnt go crazy on article submission but keep it in your arsenal.
Thanks,
March 10th, 2010 at 12:00 am
Thanks for the info. (Author and commenters!)
March 18th, 2010 at 2:39 am
i beg to disagree. articles especially on ezine provides great link juice. if your article is interesting and you place the links strategically, there is chance that readers will click your links.
March 22nd, 2010 at 1:19 pm
I agree with your points but I think article submission is great way to get back links but the article site should be having good google rank.
March 22nd, 2010 at 1:26 pm
I think article submission is best way to get backlinks easily
March 24th, 2010 at 6:22 pm
That’s quite a biased opinion with no factual evidence that article submission is actually a poor SEO tactic.
In my experience, it all depends on the quality of the article, and if you can provide more information on your website. If you write a good article with a few keyworded links back to your site, 20%-50% of the readers will click your links, and if you’re lucky, the article will be re-published with your links intact.
March 26th, 2010 at 2:29 am
Completely agree, stay away from article submissions they don’t work.
April 1st, 2010 at 12:14 am
I agree with this post, i feel article submit’s dont really have a great help , but can help with 1 small part of seo
April 8th, 2010 at 9:52 am
agree with your points but I think article submission is great way to get back links but the article site should be having good google rank
April 8th, 2010 at 9:53 am
Completely agree, stay away from article submissions they don’t work
April 12th, 2010 at 3:44 pm
I dont agree…. article submission performs a major part in seo…!!
April 20th, 2010 at 3:22 am
Hi there,
Can you give me a great list of dofollow article directories where I can submit my articles to?
Thanks.
April 28th, 2010 at 7:38 am
I guess many people are more looking for relevant back links as appose to real traffic for his site…!! Well nice article…!
April 28th, 2010 at 3:31 pm
I was just thinking of doing some article submissions for my website, I had already done ezine articles. But now after reading this I feel my time may be wasted.
May 10th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
This article and comments started out well but the point got missed along the way.
Things I agree with :
An article once a month to about 5 good article sites buils backlinks yes, but not top quality because they get diluted.
The good thing is they come from a relevant source. relevant is the article you have submitted coincides with the topic and relevance of your site.
For example this is a pr 4 page but you will notice that I have anchor texted in the name suffolk hotels (a client Im working on)now ordinarilly this would be a good link pr4 but is the page relevant? NO because the majority of the content is to do with articles, so all you guys who have been anchor texting away, good effort but it wont really play any relevance to your site. Also there are way over 40 outbound links from the page now so all that great Link juice has been massivly diluted.
Find relevant pages to comment and submit to a few article sites, you will also notice that your article will build relevance and higher pr over the years, so it is a long term startegy also. I forgot Essex Hotels, relevant…not really !
May 11th, 2010 at 2:15 am
The whole issue is a little confusing for me as I have just joined 2 of the leading mass article distribution services availible. Unique Article Wizard and My Article Network. UAW distributes to 11000 Article Directories but requires you to write 3 copies of your original Article wich is disected by paragraphs and spun making hundreds of possible different Article combinations, this is useful and will help in not breaking duplicate content penalties. My article network is simmilar but distributes only to Blogs, it also asks you to re write up to 10 different copies which can then be spun by programs using the different paragraphs you wrote manually making hundreds of combinations to your original article but this is optional as you don’t have to re write it but they do recomend it for increase in accepted published numbers. It is all new for me but it is sounding promising in creating increased numbers of backlinks. I’m not very experienced but just testing the waters to see what works.
May 26th, 2010 at 5:57 pm
Houses are quite expensive and not every person is able to buy it. However, loans was invented to aid people in such kind of hard situations.
June 4th, 2010 at 1:14 pm
Well i don’t think so article submission is a poor tactic b/c article submission gives quality back link & target traffic
June 8th, 2010 at 9:39 am
Thanks for this article. I always wonder is article submissions a good way to build backlink. And great tips too….I should be careful not to send more then 3 articles to article directories.
June 10th, 2010 at 4:05 am
This is competition killer technique? hehe
If it’s not work.Nobody will use it and articles directory never exist at all.
June 15th, 2010 at 11:07 pm
This is an absolutely ridiculous post. Agreed, it’s not an amazing form of link building…but those 5 reasons? Really?
Embaressing haha! If all the links point at the article sites, then the article site’s page gets a better PR, then the links going to yours is more powerful!
June 22nd, 2010 at 6:56 am
Article submission is the good tactic for website promotion.I hope you agree with my point of view!
June 23rd, 2010 at 3:09 pm
Your obvious list is… obvious!
But you say that links to the article does not matter?
Well, heard of linkjuice? An article that is realated to your website content, with a anchor-text backlink passing lots of linkjuice is not exactly a low quality seo tactic.
Matter a fact. It’s probably one of the best seo tactics to use.
June 29th, 2010 at 2:45 pm
lol, think this SEO company is trying to keep this technique to themselves……..Don’t trust everything you read…..It’s a game
July 2nd, 2010 at 9:26 am
According to me article submission is one of the most powerful technique to generate artificial back links.
And if users are coming to your article then there are chances that they will land to your main website following the anchor text.
August 6th, 2010 at 2:37 am
Article submissions will really help, fresh articles will not flow pagerank but will sway ranking position, especially if the surrounding content is related industry content or the site it is hosted on is deemed as ‘authoritive’ thus will certainly be useful for SEO.
August 6th, 2010 at 11:07 am
Using articles directories is a tried and tested method for building backlinks but the goalposts have moved.It is now a case of quality rather than quantity.I tend to submit 10 unique versions of an article to the top ten directories.Then I spin the articles and dripfeed them to the the “also ran” over a period of time.This method works for backlinks and traffic.
August 9th, 2010 at 11:22 pm
Don’t necessarily agree with the five points because in your sig box you are placing links back to your site. Yes the AD site will get the weight, but it should come through to your site.
August 9th, 2010 at 11:24 pm
…should also add that the sig box will contain links to your site that should be based on keywords so that should improve the backlinks to you over the long-term.
August 12th, 2010 at 9:48 am
Thanks a million. I never knew this. Very detailed description and helpful post!
I think article submission is one of the most powerful technique to create back links to your website.
August 16th, 2010 at 12:50 am
Sometimes it gets difficult on which seo techniques to apply… i guess blog posting, article and forums combination should do the work?
August 24th, 2010 at 9:46 am
doesn’t agree much… that is one of the SEO techniques if you send your article to any article site..then you’ll have percentage the you will gain lots and unique visitors… try to think of it.. if your site is not known by the search engine, then you posted a nice article on you blog, then how are you going to gain traffic then? …so one way to gain traffic is through referral system(article submission)..
August 27th, 2010 at 9:26 am
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