Article Syndications Sites
June 26th, 2007 by Michael Gray in Grayhat SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Who’s using or has used article syndication sites heavily in the past? Seen any changes in your rankings lately? Are you using Webmaster Central, do sites who’ve syndicated your content show in your backlinks? Try popping some of those URL’s into Google to see if they are in the index, what do you see? Share your findings in the comments below …
Sphere It
June 26th, 2007 at 5:08 am
I used to run the largest article submission service on the DP forums. Using automated software I could submit an article to 250 sites in an hour and it worked exactly the same as manual submission with anchor text, deep links etc.
Having submitted articles for over 500 clients over the course of a year I came to the conclusion that article submission didn’t work so abandoned the service.
Maybe old sites benefit from submitting a few articles but certainly mass submission is useless.
Patrick (mad4)
June 26th, 2007 at 6:36 am
I have a few unmodified for 18 months test sites that were promoted with article marketing, and their rankings don’t seem to have changed.
Then again, as long as WebProNews continues to rank for my syndicated articles for terms I should be ranking for (and they do link back to source), any data I get from Google is meaningless.
Link attribution in Google is flaky, and has been for at least a month.
June 26th, 2007 at 7:11 am
I’ve came to the same conclusion like patrick.
June 26th, 2007 at 7:34 am
I wrote about the futility of writing for article directories well over a year ago http://www.seo-blog.com/publishing-articles.php and included examples. It now seems to have grown into a mini industry with an illiterate group of ‘writers’ charging fees to site owners for filling up article directories with unmitigated crap. Article directories are the trash cans of the Web, so in a perverted kind of way it’s good that people use them
- Michael
June 26th, 2007 at 9:20 am
Having spent a lot of time and money obtaining an English degree whilst “finding myself” back in the 90’s, I’ve been happy to see SEO become as content-based as it has in the last 2 years. Article writing and submitting has been a natural addition to our arsenal. I see new backlinks for the articles we submit, but I can’t honestly say without a doubt that they’re doing much for the keywords we target via hyperlinks.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:36 am
I submit articles maybe every 2 or 3 months to about a dozen directories. A few of the more popular ones have been picked up fairly well. One article was re-posted on about 143 sites in 60 days.
Only about 25% of those sites actually keep my links. When ever I find my articles with no links I email the site owner and ask them nicely to please add it back in. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:39 am
I use article directories only when I don’t have any time to write articles for my site, but still need new content up.
On that end of the spectrum, the articles do tend to work fairly well but it can take some time to find the ones worthy of re-posting. So many articles people put out there contain spelling errors and false information.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:57 am
The only change I’ve noticed is on a site for which I did a ton of article distribution. I have bloglines and technorati feeds in my G-Reader for mentions of the site, and the past couple weeks or so I’ve suddenly been getting 5-10 notifications per day of articles being syndicated.
The sites they’re coming from are huge Wordpress Mu networks. They look like mini-blogspot.com’s.
Not sure why I haven’t seen this on other sites, maybe because the site I’m thinking of is a major authority?
…running off to check on some smaller sites now.
June 26th, 2007 at 10:17 am
I wrote one article and it shows #1 in Webmaster Tools backlinks as if to rub my nose in it.
Webmaster Tools has a way of showing you how you have been an idiot spammer in the past and to be honest with you, I kinda like it.
I knew someone would post about this and other things soon, there is beauty in silence.
June 26th, 2007 at 11:51 am
I have used article submission very successfully as of late. Note that all the sites I am using it for are old and have authority already. One example is I used article submission to take a site from the 2nd page to the first page of a single word term which is one of the highest cost PPC ads you can buy.
I think the articles directories themselves are worthless, it’s when they get picked up by other sites is where the value comes in.
June 26th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
It used to be enough to get your articles into the directories such as ezinearticles.com, even if they didn’t get used by anyone else. My author’s page at ezinearticles used to have a PR of 6.
Now my author’s page at ezinearticles has no PR at all. The blog that my articles were pointing to went down from PR 5 to PR 4. Traffic from Google is about half of what it used to be. (By the way, this change in traffic happened overnight a few months ago.)
It might still work if your articles get picked up, but I don’t think having your articles in the directories themselves is any help at all anymore.
It’s too bad - it used to be so easy!
June 26th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
I started a site about a year ago that I promoted with article submissions almost exclusively. If there was a benefit it was minimal. I tried submsiion services and hand submitting to the top article sites.
Not worth it.
June 26th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Very interesting information there Jeremy Luebke, maybe those of us with old sites can use article submission to get our heads above water? I myself have always shyed away from article submission, just seemed wrong but my new thoughts are that you could encourage others to link to your site if your articles are good?
For instance, I got a site on water gardening, I could write an article to educate others about preparing their water gardens for fall. Now, is that gaming Google? Not at all, but I would suggest that Google clamp down on any PR benefit it brings, links yes, pagerank no and you know what? That is pretty much what they have and will do.
There you go, white hat article submission justification…oh well.
June 26th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
From my experience, article syndication can be a very powerful tool, but not in regards to establishing back links — which can be more than limiting. We find that submitting articles is a great way to help strengthen a brand.
For example, if a user conducts a search for “cancer treatment” and finds the majority of information published on the subject is from the Mayo Clinic, it positions them as a leader in the category and therefore the place to go for treatment. The same holds true for other products and services.
The important thing to remember is that the articles need to be relevant, well-written, and contain information that is truly useful to the reader — basically the same three key elements important to creating a good blog post.
June 27th, 2007 at 2:35 am
Talk about the fast track to Supplemental Results. I posted articles that FIRST and Google has put the pages into Supplemental.
It used to be that if you were first to post, you got credit for the article. Not any more. All (meaning 100%) of the posted articles (checked original by http://www.ArticleChecker.com)
June 27th, 2007 at 3:05 am
Hmmm… I have never done an article submission campaign but always thought it was something that worked OK, but only if you re-wrote the article every time and didn’t submit duplicate content.
Top 10 Camera phones,
Best camera phones,
Guide to camera phones,
Etc…
Not just the title but significantly changing the copy as well. Reorder the paragraphs and change descriptive words from something like Biggest to Monstrous or Gigantic, etc. It’s all the same article, just significantly different every time.
Is anyone doing it like this or is everyone just submitting duplicate content?
June 27th, 2007 at 5:43 am
I look on rewriting the articles as “gaming google”, and not rewriting as legitimate syndication that Google can partially discount if they choose.
When WebProNews pick up one of my blog posts, I don’t ask them to rewrite it, I just ask them to make sure they link back to the original.
That part of link attribution Google gets wrong currently, but I am sure they will fix it again.
On the other hand, if I was using PLR content, I would rewrite it, because I wanted that content to rank and to be in my own voice. I also wouldn’t ever submit PLR content to article directories.
June 27th, 2007 at 10:42 am
For anybody interested I just blogged about how I prefer to do article marketing.
http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/blog/article-marketing-the-right-way/
In summary I offer to custom write unique articles for anybody who wants them. They get content & I get links.
June 28th, 2007 at 12:01 am
I too have noted the steady decline of ezine directory article links.
Here’s the kicker: Google has devalued yet another method of acquiring some links for web sites that benefited like very focused niche markets and small mom and pop operations.
They devalue ezines but tell you not to buy links….something has got to give.
June 28th, 2007 at 3:47 am
base on my experience, article syndication is still an effective tool for seo.but i only submit a re-written article and i use around 10 syndication sites. no need to send to other crappy syndication sites.
June 28th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
I’ve had bad experiences with article directories lately. I submitted a solid article with two backlinks; a “directory editor” removed one of them (disregarding their own author guidelines), and the syndicators removed the other (also against the rules).
As far as I am concerned, these directories are no-value-added services, and I won’t miss them when they are gone.
June 28th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Submitting an article to multiple article directories just does not work as good today as it used to.
At one time it was a great method of getting links but today the majority of the article URLs will get indexed, stay indexed and then slowly get thrown into the supplemental index where they don’t have any value.
If you do submit articles to directories like ezinearticles.com you need to make sure and shoot some links to your article URLs to keep them in the main index and help boost the URL popularity.
The same goes for press releases that get syndicated on hundreds of sites. Pick the best sites that have age, link popularity, high deep link ratio and build links to your article/press release. If you know what you are doing you can “piggy back” on some great domains and see those pages rank very well.
June 28th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
I have seen benefit from article submission sites without question. In fact, when testing certain keywords I did nothing but major article submission sites vs. nothing but mass article submission. I saw improved ranking from both.
June 28th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
I’ve only used a article submission site once. I didn’t see the benefit of it so I stopped. I made a decision to earn backlinks the old fashioned way…. time & writing content everyday. Eventually you get proper backlinks over time, which google likes, and eventually rewards with pagerank
I don’t believe in getting “backlinks” quickly. It takes time..
June 29th, 2007 at 2:44 am
I have tried articles submission as well as submitting website to directories but haven’t seen any changes in ranking. I just come to know that my site is in supplemental results. Although i dont have duplicate content.
June 29th, 2007 at 3:33 am
I think article submission goes more for traffic generation. The future is bleak if one is to bank on article submission for backlinks because most re-posters do not credit you much by providing a backlink.
June 29th, 2007 at 8:14 am
Michael, you’ve been curiously quiet on your own findings?
What prompted you to start this post?
July 3rd, 2007 at 2:13 am
I find article directory submissions beneficial, but only when the article itself is syndicated. I recently wrote a article and within 3 days it had been syndicated to over 10,000 sites. It helped me rank a site in the top 50 search results in less than 1 week time, the site was not even in the top 1000 before I submitted it to the article directories. I also only used about 25 “high quality” directories, its not about quantity, its quality. Quality meaning visitors actually syndicate from the directory, like EZineArticles, those are always syndicated by a large number of sites.
I must point out, I recently sold my article directory site because I seen a downward trend with directories during the last Google PR update. My article directory was ranked with PR5 and took a hard hit and went down to PR1, the traffic fell off a little but somewhat sustained itself (especially since I never advertised my directory, it was all word-of-mouth traffic and had got about 2,500 uniques a day).
July 10th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
We have number 2 & 4 G positions for one client in an exercise related key phrase (2 words, KD says 6500 searches / month).
The entire link-building effort was directory submission and regular article directory submissions. We use a combination of one of the automated submission sites and 6-10 higher quality syndication sites (ezine, buzzle, goarticles, etc.).
No difference in articles or resources.
In addition to the SERPs, the directories themselves are among our top referrers.
I think the key is consistency. 10 or more high quality articles each and every month. We started gaining in SERPs within about 3-4 months and have stayed there (about a year in).
I’m still a believer, but quality matters. Some of our lower quality editorial is much less effective — so perhaps it’s the secondary syndication of the higher quality stuff driving it.
July 26th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
I’ve been reading a lot about the effectiveness of article submissions for SEO and traffic-driving purposes and can’t believe how people gloss over the quality aspect. Granted a lot of the articles or posts I found were old (this was the most recent one by far), but they talked about automatic submissions to a hundred sites, etc. I took a look on Ezinearticles.com in the category I’d want to try out for one on my clients and there were about 100 articles by the same person just changing the state reference in the title and body. Is that hard to believe that quality actually does matter if you want your article reprinted? I’m willing to put the time into writing good articles and it makes sense to me that a well written article has the best change of getting picked up and providing value.
Only a few “quality” article submission sites were actually mentioned in the preceding comments, yet different numbers were thrown out for the actual number of quality submission sites used by the posters. Anyone care to share what sites other than ezine, goarticles and buzzle?
August 5th, 2007 at 10:53 am
Responding to Jason’s comment, I think the quality thing is big. E.g., I’m a small business CPA and a pretty experienced computer book writer. (My best-selling book was Quicken for Dummies.) But what I was going to say is that when I do a good article on a timely topic, I get other good sites to re-publish… Like an article published at year-end on new tax law changes… If I do that, I tend to get a CPA firm or two to pick up. I assume that’s a good link. I’m sure it is.
BTW, another semi-funny related point. I try to be really careful about my author bio so it shows credibility, mentions best-selling books I’ve written, etc. What I’m now finding is that ezinearticles won’t let me mention I wrote some Dummies books. (Apparently they’re worried about the trademark–though the publisher isn’t.) I think that’s bad in a sense because that deletion means I look like less of an expert author and am less likely have my stuff re-published.
I haven’t don’t this yet, but I’m starting to think about just writing some articles for good niche-y sites (like CPA firms, etc.) and approaching them directly.
August 22nd, 2007 at 8:27 am
Quality is great, but there is also a use for lower quality articles on these syndication sites. We’ve been using them in combination with other tactics to help boost some of our “articles” on authoritative UGC and social voting sites. Granted, our test is tainted with other links, but I think low value links are still usefully when they’re pointing at authority.
October 9th, 2007 at 7:42 am
Yeah, Michael, what are your own findings/thoughts?
I myself have used a mass article submission once. It helped for the keywords the articles and the links targeted, but not by a large margin.
The key here is:
- a quality article to be syndicated on many sites, with links inside
- the right anchor text, as natural as you can get
- quality, not quantity. Forget about mass submission, submit to 20-30 directories, if not to the best 10
November 5th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
I am kind of surprised at some of the commenters saying they are seeing bad results with article submissions.
I still receive visitors on a daily basis to my sites from articles in EzineArticles that are over 2 years old.
I think the days of mass submitting to get a lot of quick links are probably over but if you write a good article and submit it to a couple of top directories you should see some traffic.
Maybe not like the “old days” because of competition, etc. but still some traffic and you also build up your name as an authority.
Just my .02,
Mike
November 12th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
I have been doing article submissions for twelve years for clients. The technique and effectiveness has changed over the years. I used to post articles to several hundred sites but that no longer works. Now I create a custom list for clients that is much shorter 50-75 sites and I even choose sites where the author should contribute an original article. Done this way it still works.
Bonnie