Aug 9, 2009

Article Directories – A Waste of Time?

Gary Eckstein Search Engine Optimization 2 article directories, article directory, articles, backlinks, inlinks, linking, seo

Heard of the various Article Directories (GoArticles, Article Dashboard, EzineArticles etc.)? Well so have the Search Engines! Search Engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.) publicly state that they frown upon duplicate content (the article doesn’t need to constitute plagiarism however no added value is deemed ‘bad’). Article Directories are portals for distributing the same content to multiple websites.

Why Submit content to EzineArticles, GoArticles etc.?

So why do people submit articles to these directories? The primary reason is to attain links from external websites to their (or their customers) Sites. A person writes an article and places hyperlinks in the article to their chosen website. The author then submits the article to one of the Article Directories. The author now has links from the Article Directories to their chosen Sites. The Services then allow for the article to be republished without amendment. Each time the article is republished the authors chosen Sites attain further links.

The Importance of Link Quality

In terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), there are two schools of thought about links; those that believe that any link is a good thing and those who say that quality links are the only effective links and any low quality links are detrimental.

If the first is true, that any link is good, then Article Directories have a valid function.

If the second is true then the value of the Article Directories is limited. High quality Websites do not republish content and the Search Engines are certainly advanced enough to determine that any article with a link back to a directory is duplicate content (and therefore the perceived quality of the article is diminished).

Are Multiple Links Good?

There are two other well known SEO linking limitations relevant to this article; multiple links from the same Website is not as beneficial as many links from many websites (i.e. multiple articles on GoArticles with links to the same website is not necessarily more beneficial than a single link from a single article). The second is that the relevance of the linking site to the destination site is important (e.g. if a Business University links to a Business Consultant Site this is a relevant link). Is an article republishing Site really relevant with the same target audience as for your Site? Probably not.

None of this Matters Anyway as your Article won’t be Republished

The entire argument detailed in this article however may just be in vain! If the objective of submitting articles to the directory is to have content republished then just how often will your article be republished? Likely not often at all (if ever). A very small percentage of articles get republished frequently however the vast majority never get published.

Which Article Service to Use

I have both published to and from (not on this Site) some of the directories. I believe that there is a place however for the good quality Article Directories…

My advice; if you are going to publish to the Article Directories then use one of the high quality ones such as EzineArticles. The rules for submission and republishing are stringent however this means that only better republishers will use your content.

P.S. Don’t Use Rewriting Software

To those people using software to amend original document wording to create a ‘new’ original document … you are wasting your time. The quality of the reproduced articles is terrible and no good quality Website will republish this content.