What is the purpose of submitting your blog articles to directories?

[kevinyu1029]

I was wondering what the purpose of submitting your blog articles to directories are.  Doesn't it require enough "points" or "+1's" for it to become a "do-follow" link?

People on the forum talk about automating directory submission, can anyone recommend a good software for this?  I've been hearing that Google Penalizes you for article submission because it looks like spam?

[webfeatseo]

Nailed it. I hate content spinning and software to do it.

The last company I worked for (ch e ck n Go) was developing a huge script that would rip thousands of pages of content, replace various words with theirs, put in their links, and mass publish hundreds to thousands of these pages a day.

Very unethical and very pathetic.

Write high quality content and do the work.

[RobertFisher]

I was going to leave this lie and I already thumbed up Gianluca for his (as always) excellent response, but whenever I see the word spinning it bugs me. There was another question today re finding duplicate content on your own website. I went to copyscape.com and put in a portion of an article I had written about a drug in about October of 2010. I was looking to see if it showed up in two client websites as a blog posting. Imagine when I saw it in several other sites with poor grammar added and misused modifiers, etc.

So, the whole idea of using some crap spinning software and churning out anything in twenty different and bad permutations is the most counterproductive SEO tactic today. Then to submit it to clowns who are going to have links to you for a fee is the second most counterproductive.

Lastly, in SEO, when you have found the easy way to do something, generally, it is wrong or at best very temporary. Think about it, if it is easy every clown who professes SEO knowledge is doing it so there is no advantage. Those who truly work at SEO are the ones who succeed for themselves, their companies, and their clients. Write good content. Do the work to get good links. Then sit back and smile when you smoke these chumps.

Sorry for the rant. I had a moment

[gfiorelli1]

Hi Kevin!

The first thing you must ask yourself is this one: why do I need to post articles in posts/articles directories.

Surely you'd like to do it for link building reasons...

But is it worth the time and bucks spent? I personally think it is not.

The fact is that article marketing directories give you an easy way to create backlinks is surely tempting, but they are bad quality links. As Rusty wrote, they pass very few PR because:

1. many of the article marketing directories have their PageRank discounted by Google;
2. you article with your backlink very fastly deepens in the archive section of the directory or in one of the many faceted pages, which usually have almost 0 PR

Secondly, the articles published in those kind of directory right now rarely are picked up by other webmasters in order to fullfill their content needs, therefore the original reason to be of those sites (publish your original content to see it redistributed with an attribution link) is totally failing and fading.

So... in order to see some kind of effect on your ranking thanks to this hiperspammed tactic (and I'm sorry to notice that Rusty practically suggest to follow this way) you would need literally hundreds if not thousanda of articles.

That means that even though article marketing at first seems fast and cheap, on a large scale it is not, all the contrary: it expensive, time wasting and overly distracting.

If you have the money and time to engage in that kind of big scale strategy, then you'll probably see still a good effect on your rankings, results that probably  will be blown away if only Google decide to put a final end to these kind of links.

I don't say you have not to use article marketing (or PR sites for press releases), but do it once in a while creating always original content, not respinning it all over the web and just to create diversity in your link profile.

But I suggest you to change your link building chip, and start using other more productive and effective ways in order to create link building occasions:

• spend the time in bettering your own blog, making it known through social media interaction with other bloggers and site owner;
• creating connections with other bloggers in your market in order to create guest blogging opportunities;
• invest your money creating amazing content, or simply very good one that people would naturally like to share and link to;
• invest part of the budget which would be spent in article marketing (37$ * XY article... ) in Adwords in order to make your site stand up in front of your potential users while you're creating a solid link profile which can help you ranking higher. That adwords will help you for branding and making your site known and, eventually, reviewed, linked to and shared, not just for monetary conversions.
• and so on and on.

I do really suggest you to look at this old (august 2011) Whiteboard Friday by Rand Fishkin:Article Marketing: Mostly a Scam

Ciao!!!

[RustyF]

To get backlinks from high pr websites and to get traffic. I use to use the Ezines a lot. I do't any more as they have become too picky about approvals and I now question their worth. One article I posted did get me some traffic.  It didn't seem to help with my PR much at all. It remained at one for a long time.

These sites often have a high PR but I've always wondered how much Google values the links from such sites. Google has to know that most of the content on these sites are publish in order to gain backlinks from the site owner.

I'll usually add a spun article to several of these sites for a new site.  Having multiple links from the same domain is not a huge value unless you get traffic from it. If the directory loves your content and features it, you'll get traffic. Otherwise, I'm not sure. I found the articles on Ezine competing with my site. They allow you to post the same content from  your site IF it is posted under the same author name. If you play with Ezine they will ban you in a heartbeat. Only post original content there. Not spun.  I often saw my article ranking slightly higher there than I did on my own site. I even removed on article from Ezines because of that.

Now if you're having trouble getting a site indexed at all, article directories will help.

Others swear by them and put a lot of time into them. I think blog networks work much better if they have a large number of sites that my articles get published on. That is what is meant by in content links. And they are the links that Google is said to put the main value on.  I'm in two such networks. One has almost all PR0 and PR1 sites. So its not of a great value. The other one though has given me links from PR4 and PR5 sites which is very good.

I'm about to drop them though and go with an out sourcing. I found someone that will write the content, spin it and publish to seven of the largest and best article directories. The cost is not cheap at $37 per article but the impact will likely be higher than me posting manually to the to the two blog networks each day. My cost are going to double and the number of different links and different articles is going to go down. However, I'll be on more websites with higher PR and I don't need to sign up for all those network blogs myself. One of which would cost me $99 a month.  I'm in that one now on a trial but I'm going to cancel it.

Now my thinking could be all wrong but that's how I see it.