Forum Moderators: martinibuster
1) What are a few quality sites where you can submit articles? (Not 100 in a list but 2-5 quality submission sites)
2) Does anyone have any examples of articles they have written that were widely distributed? Any tips on achieving this?
3) Would an article on the history of the sundial be a good idea for a site that sells sundials?
Thanks for your help, questions 1 & 2 are the ones I am most interested in.
Sad but true, none of us really KNOW anything about the SE's algorithmns. Sheer speculation, though there's a fair amount of useful insight and well-thought deduction that comes out of these forums. I'm sure the guys at google are both alternately amazed and humored by what they read here.
NOONE knows anything about the true workings of the SE's or these 'rules' of theirs.If that were true, then Google etc can be taken advantage of which I imagine is going to cost them millions in ad revenues. I don't think Google or other engines will allow that to happen somehow.
Are you serious? At any point in this thread have you contributed to the topic?
No one, huh? Do you realize that amongst us there are individuals who build search engines? Individuals who create algorithms...
"Google can be taken advantage of..." heh, what do you think happens everyday?
I would say that amongst the top things to put a lot of consideration into is the breadth of distribution an article will receive from each source you submit it to. Taking that in mind, be careful that your backlink landscape isn't left looking unnatural in terms of inbound anchor text density.
No one, huh? Do you realize that amongst us there are individuals who build search engines? Individuals who create algorithms...
Yes, deadly serious thank you. Just because some can build SE's doesn't make them ex Google employees or spies from the CIA or MI5...
I would say that amongst the top things to put a lot of consideration into is the breadth of distribution an article will receive from each source you submit it to. Taking that in mind, be careful that your backlink landscape isn't left looking unnatural in terms of in bound anchor text density.
you might also want to write to a level that more readers can understand:
"Submit to websites that encourage wide distribution of your article. Try and vary the anchor text used to link back to your website."
Normal directories and SE's won't link to them unless said article is hosted on a site. But what if there is no proper portal (apart from articlebanks) for this purpose? As most articles are low quality, I cannot for the life of me see any offline publication touching them.
I suppose electronic ezines are worth a go, but are these not just a dumping ground for qualityless content. I suggest that once these few options are used - what next? Webmasters aren't going to build a seperate section for articles as that will conflict with site's theme and purpose, which they may not want.
There's been a lot of talk about writing articles for promotional purposes over the years, but to me there is no doubt that article writing is undervalued by most webmasters. I've seen all kinds of trends come and go, but good content is not a fad, and the market can never be over saturated with good, original content.
discuss the best methods to use in creating and publishing articles.
Any suggestions would be welcome, what works for you?
If a site will not write thier own article and publish on thier own site why would they donate?
If a site will not write thier own article and publish on thier own site why would they donate?
Bottom line is that the owner of the article has to see a benefit from donating an article. A few months back I saw a post here that said that 80 new article submission sites were going online daily. Now that is a fad, and I think it has pretty much already come to an end with Jagger. An article site that accepts all articles that are submitted is really nothing more than a keyword-heavy link farm. Article sites with strict guidelines (which requires human review) almost always rank much better.
The owner of the article must be able to get more benefit from placing the article on another site than would be had by placing the article on their own site. Some article sites get very heavy traffic. Most get very little. If you could promote your web site on a different web site that was very popular, that would be worth a lot of money. High-traffic article submission sites give you this for free.
Any suggestions would be welcome, what works for you?
We hand-review all submitted articles. When you read a few hundred articles a day for any length of time, you can pretty easily spot which articles are going to do well and which ones will garner no interest from people or search engines.
The number one rule I would give in writing effective articles is that the article must answer a question.
The number two rule is that the title must reflect the question that is answered.
I wouldn't even say that the question needs to be a question that is asked a lot. There's too much competition for the question "who has the lowest credit card rates". There are many questions people need an answer to where there is very little competition (like the history of credit cards). Answers to those questions will get you much more traffic.
This has more to do with getting traffic from your articles and not link popularity, so maybe it doesn't belong in this thread. It's the best advice I have though.
let us know what your site is? Can't hurt
Not a chance, but thanks for asking ;)
You can easily tell the serial article posters - as they HAVE to identify themselves to get the credit. I see 10 or so 'writers' who do this and they aren't doing this for their love of writing.
Anyone that creates worthless articles just doesn't interest me, and I feel that if someone goes to the trouble of writing articles regularly, they could at least put some effort into it and make them interesting and full of facts and tips etc. Then that would produce more clickthroughs for them?
Web surfers soon learn what is quality and what isn't -and guess which gets ignored...... So if you want to get your link out there, start producing quality!
Generally, true, but there's no reason why an individual desiring to promote his sites can't submit a large number of high quality, well-thought, and well-written articles for this purpose. As dataguy said, the best content will be the content that serves a need, eg answers a question.
I have myself posted disparaging remarks about article writing as a promotional technique, but this was in response to seeing very poorly written articles that surfaced on a large number of ezines.
95 percent of anything is crap, but that doesn't mean you throw the baby out with the bath water, by which I mean to say that article writing, even for purely promotional purposes, can, nonethless, provide good content and serve the needs of web users.
In the end, we can only rely on article site operators to publish good quality content...as we continue to hope that google and the other SE's will be able to distinguish good serps from spammy bad serps.
Thanks for enlightening me. Perhaps, you could look in my profile (I don't hide my site), visit me, and give me a potential articles submitters perspective.
I'm not sure I understand why you will not share your site in a sticky?
I could imagine the flood of stickys and emails he might get.
I just noticed that, on ezinearticles, approved articles will appear on pages...that have pagerank seemingly appearing in the tool bar as soon as the article goes live.
How is this possible if the document that has been created is, in fact, a newly created document?
I never noticed this before and I remember someone here once commenting on the pagerank benefits of that site. Now I wonder if there is something else going on and if pagerank is even being passed from that site (which is no big deal since, to me, article submission is for branding and for link benefits other than pagerank).
Wow, great site. Very useful information. You know, when you spend your days looking at sites that push the limits of reasonable SEO it's nice to see a site that so obviously looks like it was built for real live users.
Your site certainly answers questions, and does it well. If you're not getting a hefty stream of traffic it would be a surprise to me.
I don't know if you've submitted your articles outside of your web site, but I think I would recommend you keep them for yourself. If you submit articles anywhere else, I wouldn't use the articles that are already on your site.
usually 5's
That does seem a bit odd, at least to me.
Yes- very very important- I made an agreement with a content syndicater a year ago who copied 5 articles from my site each on several thousand non-spammy sites. My site took a big hit in Jagger. I suspect dup content as one of the central causes. Google also depreciated several thousand backlinks from these sites. No longer showing up in links:command.
Nonetheless, Yahoo still includes all these links and the site is #1 there. Google traffic however is down 60%
A) Suppose I have some articles about widgets on my site - I have written them myself, primarily for my visitors, so they can find out all about widgets in general before buying.
Say I was to submit these articles to ezinearticles / goarticles etc. because I think they would be useful to other people, who might paste them on their own sites, and that would be good for getting backlinks. It may also be good for getting traffic.
Now, would my site be penalised because of the duplicate content? Some people in this thread have already said YES, my own site would be penalised, so it is best to have a different collection of articles reserved for syndication purposes. Alternatively, put a "disallow" entry in my robots.txt so these articles are not crawled.
I hear what you are saying, but what puzzles me is that ezinearticles and goarticles seemingly have not been penalised for duplicate content, so is this fear real?
Secondly, I thought the duplicate content penalties were intended to target scraper sites, not people legitimately copying articles. Although my article page and the ezinearticles page with my article will have the same article, the pages will have only a low % similarity because my page templates are totally different from ezinearticles's templates. So would the SEs still penalise this as duplicate content?
B) Conversely, suppose I see an article on ezinearticles that appears to be genuinely useful for my visitors because it talks about widgets too. If I was to put this article on my site because I think it would be great for my visitors, would this attract a duplicate content penalty for my site?
Would you recommend that I put a "disallow" entry in robots.txt for this too?
How is this possible if the document that has been created is, in fact, a newly created document?
The articles are named http:*//ezine*articles.com/?The-Title-Of-Your-Article&id=1111111111
The "?The-Title-Of-Your-Article" variable is totally superfluous, and is there purely for SEO, as far as I can tell.
The "&id=1111111111" number is the serial number of your article.
Basically, when you request the article, you are sending a variable to the index.html page at ezinearticles.com which is presumably redirecting via a mod_rewite or serving the article itself. In either case, you are seeing the page rank of the index.html file, NOT your article in particular.
I don't know whether a link on a index.html?page=xyz page passes the same amount of PR as a link on the index.html page. This is possibly a loophole in the PR concept, as you can create any number of?page=xyz pages, each inheriting the PR of the parent page. A bit like printing your own currency...?
The Google engineer repeatedly said, "there is no dupe content penalty, Google just doesn't want to display the same information in more than one listing". This makes sense to me, and would lead me to believe that having a copy of an article on your site, or submitting an original article from your site, will not get your entire site penalized though the web site with the greatest PR/history etc. will probably be the one which actually gets the listing in Googles' SERPs. Separate from this, I also think there is some sort of SPAM trigger that is set off if a web site contains too much duplicate content, which would merit de-listing or de-ranking, but I think that this is not a duplicate content penalty, it is rather a low signal of quality penalty.
My advice is then that if your website doesn't have a lot of traffic and you have some good articles, you will likely see a great benefit from submitting your articles to other popular sites like ezinearticles and goarticles. If you already have good traffic and loyal visitors, I'd recommend keeping the articles on your site only. Writing slightly different articles and submitting them would be the best thing if you wanted to submit some articles to outside sources.
As for copying articles for use on your own site, my experiences is that if the articles are useful to your visitors, then go ahead and add them to your site, but you will probably not see any search engine traffic from those articles since your copy will not have the longest history or highest PR for the page the article is on.
Just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Nope, I think your post sounds very logical and makes total sense. I think your right.
In which case, an unethical competitor could conceivably do this to your site on purpose etc.
I am aware of at least one black hat script being sold currently which scrapes from article directories and then auto-posts to splogs at pre-set times. Just create 500 blogger.com blogs and voila! Your own splog link farm.
