Article Directories | Gary Eckstein

Posts Tagged ‘article directories’

Plagiarism and Dishonesty on the Internet

October 30, 2009

Backlinks are essential in getting a favourable position in the Google, Bing and Yahoo Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). There are various means of attaining links (backlinks) to a Website with publishing articles online as a means of achieving this. How this method works is that an article is published on one of the article submission services and the author may include a little sales pitch (with links) at the end of the article. The article may be republished from the article service however it must be republished ‘as is’ (i.e. no changes). If the article is therefore republished the author may expect to attain numerous links to their website. Unfortunately plagiarism and dishonest abounds on the Internet.

Plagiarism when Copying Content

I really don’t know why but the vast majority of republishers attempt to claim the articles from these article services as their own or else remove the links and add their own. This is not only against the various article services terms of use however is really ‘cheap’. Why not just publish the article as-is and give credit where it is due? There is no negative impact of being honest so why try to pass the content as someone else’s.

Give Credit where it is Due

I decided to do a quick check on articles that I have published on Ezinearticles to see whether my articles are being attributed correctly. I found that my articles have been republished (in one case a few hundred times) however only very few republishers aren’t removing the links and author name. I really do not understand the reason for this dishonesty; if you are copying someone’s work then at least give credit to the author.

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High PageRank Article Directories

August 20, 2009

Part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is getting quality incoming links (also called backlinks and inlinks). Links are not simple to attain! One means of possibly attaining links is to publish articles for reuse through one of the various article publishing Sites /Article Directories. The advantage of using these Directories is that other sites may republish your articles and therefore you’ll attain extra links.

There are many Article Directories however few that offer quality links. Here is a list of the Article Directories with a Google PageRank of PR5 or higher (See my article about the importance of Quality links from Article Directories):

Article Directory

URL

PageRank

isnare.com http://www.isnare.com/

PR6

Helium http://www.helium.com/

PR6

GoArticles http://www.goarticles.com/

PR6

EzineArticles http://www.ezinearticles.com/

PR6

Weeno http://www.weeno.com/

PR5

Site Reference http://www.site-reference.com/

PR5

Buzzle.com http://www.buzzle.com/

PR5

ArticleDashboard.com http://www.articledashboard.com/

PR5

articleclick http://www.articleclick.com/

PR5

articlecity http://www.articlecity.com/

PR5

Articlebase http://www.articlesbase.com/

PR5

Article Pool http://www.articlepool.com/

PR5

Article Alley http://www.articlealley.com/

PR5

A1Articles http://www.a1articles.com/

PR5

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Article Directories – A Waste of Time?

August 9, 2009

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.

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