Article Directories: Effective SEO Tool or Not?
Some months ago, I wrote an article a month for a client and had them submitted to 1000 article directories and PR distribution sites. Was it effective? I think only my client would know exactly. However, as an observation, I noticed it took around 1-2 months a lot of times, for some of the directories to approve or reject the article. Never mind about the marketing aspect of article marketing — what about the SEO? Does blasting your article to 1000+ directories really help with the SEO? Let’s analyze the situation and perhaps we’ll get something off of this.
1. Duplicate Content Anyone?
I’m a lurker of a popular writer’s online hub. There were some discussions about RSS feeds and article directory submissions. A couple of them were strong champions of article directory submissions. I asked them if Google’s duplicated content penalty didn’t both them. Said writers didn’t even know what duplicated content means! Figures. When you submit one article to 1000+ article directories, that would mean your content appears on more than one web site and you can get penalized by Google for duplicated content. What does this penalization entail? You articles won’t rank for their keywords results directing to your article might get thrown into the Google supplementals.
2. Does Google Value Backlinks from Article Directories?
I would like to bring my post of selling backlinks to attention. If Google’s finding ways to eliminate the paid links into the computation for the Google PageRank algorithm, I don’t see why something similar won’t be in effect for article directories. Matt Cutts, in his post back in 2005, said that Google values natural and reciprocal links. Since links from article directories are synthetic, does Google value backlinks from article directories? Perhaps now Google does, but until when?
Still, not everything is about Google PageRank. Some people get into article marketing for the sole purpose of driving traffic to their site. The question in that case would be if article marketing does drive in the traffic. But that’s a post for an online marketing blog.
