Article Directory Submission

[Ian001]

Sorry if this is a really daft question, but from an SEO perspective, what are the advantages of submitting your own articles to directories? And if you're article is used on another site doesn't that reflect badly on your own site?

Thanks

Ian

[Fraser]

I've dabbled in this but mostly found people just used my articles without including the links that they were supposed to. When I complained to the article resource site I had used they pretty much told me it was my problem

I think it's probably best tried with content that you aren't going to include on your own site. Write something new and use it as a test.

[trigger571]

I dabbed with this too. As Fraser said, you will find it difficult to police those sites which actually do link to you. Most will not which is quite naughty!

On the other hand, I picked content from Article sites, and if the article is related to your site, it could really boost your rankings. In simplistic terms the way it works is as follows:

Lets assume the original writers site has an relativly themed site, and google gives it 5 points (not PR, we are talking assumptions - we will come to that later).
Now, lets say you have the same theme on your site, but google gives you 6 points for its Theme.
Therefore, the keywords within the article will be given precedence on your site, so your site will get ranked.

I've tried this on a number of experiments and it always seemed to correlate.

Back to PR now. As everyone will agree, the PR score is not half as important as it used to be. Many other factors determin how your site will rank. These include but not limited to PR, Quality Links, age of site, site coding, site theme and a whole host of other issues. There is also the issue of the Oldest content being indexed and ranked first. One trick I used to find very effective is to log on to the article submission sites and pick ONLY articles which got submitted in the last 48 hours. That way, its highly probable that no other site has had the article indexed yet and you are on a fair level playing field with just the Theme of your site to contend with.

Hope I didn't loose you on this one!

[Ian001]

Cheers guys. This was really my main concern; that any articles used would not be linked back to my site and I could potentially be penalised for duplicate content. Might try writing some articles which I won't actually put on my site, see how effective that is.

[Top banana]

Article submissions do help increase your rankings but their importance has reduced over the last year or so. Here is some advice to get the most of them:

1) Only submit to high quality or niche directories - There is a big different between the value passed from different article sites / directories. Some pass no value at all and therefore you would be wasting your time submitting to them. I do have a list somewhere of the better article sites, but need to dig it out .

2) Don't post the same article on your own site - there is a risk of duplicate-content penalty, so why risk it? Also articles for article sites dont need to be high quality, they should only take 15 mins to write (if you know what you are writting about and dont get interupted), and to be honest they wouldn't add much value to my site so i dont add them.

3) Have different versions for different article sites - some sites allow links in the article itself other only in the author bio. Produce two version and submit to the relevant sites.

4) Consider employing a writer and /or submitter - try digitalpoint.com the costs can be low e.g. $10 for a 400 word article, and about $15 to submit to 200+ sites. It save times, but most of the 200 sites are pretty useless, so it not as great as it first sounds.

More info here: http://www.seobook.com/archives/000099.shtml (this article is couple of years out of date but most of the principles are still valid).