Mass submitting the same article to different directories?

[littlegiant]

Greetings,

I've been plowing through reams of forum posts on article marketing and I can't seem to find the answer to a simple question. I'd like to know what are the limits to mass submitting the same article to different article directories. What is the reasonable and sane thing to do? Does it make sense to submit the same article to say 30 or 40 different article directories? 100? 200? All of them?

This is especially with regards to using article submitter software.

Any comment would be appreciated. Thanks.

[MrSpeed]

I did an experiment and hired a service to submit to directories. I think they did over 200. I can't say it helped my ranking at all. And if I remember it gained me a pagerank of 1.

I think a better strategy is to just submit to the top 10-20 directories. Anything over that is just diminishing returns.

Also it's a good idea to write unique content specifically for articles. You don't want to get dinged with duplicate content from your main site.

[edited by: MrSpeed at 12:06 am (utc) on Mar. 13, 2007]

[littlegiant]

Much thanks for your input, MrSpeed. I'm surprised at the appararent lack of information on this. Article submitter software abounds but very few seem to have a clear idea on how effective it is to mass submit articles.

[sunny_kat]

I would suggest submitting an article not to more than 5 avenues as they are syndicated with many others.

[littlegiant]

By 'avenues', I'm assuming you mean each article directory constitutes an 'avenue'? Just to clarify...

[sem4u]

Article writing and distribution is something I am really starting to take a serious look at. The problem I see is that if exactly the same article is submitted to a number of arcticle sites only one version will count on Google as the others get marked down for being duplicates? Is this correct?

[MrSpeed]

Yeah that is correct. The article sites get dinged for duplicate content. That's why I recommend writing unique articles just for the article directories. This way your site won't get clumped into the dupe content.

[littlegiant]

MrSpeed, in other words, you don't recommend submitting the same article to different article directories at all? Huh?

[sunny_kat]

Mr Speed

You mean to say that the articles or press releases submitted should not be made live on the website before submission?

[MrSpeed]

You should write two different articles. One for your site and one for the article directories. It's ok to submit the same article to all the directories. They will get hist for duplicate content, not you.

Just my two cents.

[sem4u]

If the article sites get hit for duplicate content and so do the sites that republish the articles, then the inbound links from these sources won't be worth much SEO-wise?

[lfgoal]

" If the article sites get hit for duplicate content and so do the sites that republish the articles, then the inbound links from these sources won't be worth much SEO-wise? "

This has occurred to me as well. However, I know of cases where sites have used article writing to make it fairly high up the ladder for the keywords they were targeting.

I don't think google is really that discriminating as to where your links come from. However, how EFFECTIVE these kinds of links are depends on a few variables such as how crowded the niche is and whether your competitors have better links, more links, or a combination of the two.

In other words, crap links can give you some movement, or not. It just depends on what the competition is and how well they are armed.