Article Directories

Are they Good for Developing Backlinks?

[PowerUp]

Hi,

I'm thinking about submitting articles to other websites as backlinks to my site. However, I have some questions.

1. If I submit the same article to many websites, will these other websites be hit by the "duplicate content" penalty?

2. Would it penalize me if the article submitted also appears on my own site?

3. Who owns the copyright of the article submitted? How do I prove that I hold the copyright if I didn't publish it in the first place?

4. What type of sites will benefit from this link building strategy? I mean, I can't imagine a website about soccer scores submitting "articles" to other websites.

I might have more questions later on, but these are the ones I can think of now.

Thanks for your comment.

[edited by: PowerUp at 1:46 am (utc) on May 15, 2007]

[le_gber]

If I submit the same article to many websites, will these other websites be hit by the "duplicate content" penalty?

they might do - the page the article is on anyway- , it depends on how many different sites you were thinking of submitting it to. What you have to think about as well is the interest of the sites owner to show an article that appear on 10 other sites

Would it penalize me if the article submitted also appears on my own site?

no necessaraly penalise but it may get burried under other site with greater trustRank (in the supplemental index)

Who owns the copyright of the article submitted? How do I prove that I hold the copyright if I didn't publish it in the first place?

that wouls depend on the tos / agreement you have with the site owner

What type of sites will benefit from this link building strategy? I mean, I can't imagine a website about soccer scores submitting "articles" to other websites.

why not? it depends what the article is about. if you target some job sites, write something about how the world cup has an effect on people (calling in sick to watch games). If you target money/financial sites, talk about the players salary, club budget etc...

[Helpinghand]

It's all very well writing articles, but top sites (MSN) etc, only accept them from professional, well-known writers.

Any articles you write need to be of such brilliance, to be taken seriously and work at the professional level - for them to be accepted. Many aren't, and if we are honest, articles today are soley knocked out by the ton for a sales plug.

I get this a lot on my forum, also on my article site too, so I know what I'm talking about. It's a shame this is practised, as there are far better things you can do with your time.

I'd say 99.9% of the articles I get sent, are trash - they are deleted so fast, you wouldn't believe it, and they never make it onto my site. Top websites demand great content, and anything that falls short of the best won't be listed.

I wrote about 20 articles and submitted them to 10 article directories, and the result was pretty poor to be honest. Just 1 got put on a half-decent ezine type site, and I don't even get much traffic from it, the articles that did get picked up, got used on scraper sites. People will steal your content and pass it off as their own, so it depends whether you want that battle....

A famous writer once said "When you write a book - your first effort will be rubbish"

You just can't decide to be a writer, they are born! You need to know why you want to do this, and if it's only to drop links, then you may not be taken seriously.

Good luck

[usasportstraining]

I've used articles to add relavent content. Just do a search for "free content". There are a couple sites that have articles from good authors (at least in my genre; triathlon training products).

If they are well written articles by knowledgeable authors, as far as the topic is concerned, then I see it as win-win-win. The article site, the author (for recognition and backlinks), and the webmaster benefits (with good content).

[Helpinghand]

I can't believe so many actually fall for this. Article writing is a scam in itself, much content for the article is actually lifted from other professional sources. I'm saying this is so easily done, you wouldn't believe it, nor if you received one would you know it was stolen content, and unknowingly might even pass it on - where the reciever would pass it on etc. Filling up the web with junk.....

Today, I made up yet another article from 3 different sources and got it published on a website. There you go, worthless and not even written by me.

So basically, I ripped off someone elses work, created duplicate content and am now reaping the rewards from the free link. The article is just a tool, that is all it's worth, and I sincerely doubt that the site/s that ripped off my ripped off article:

a) are aware of what I did

b) don't care

c) unknown to them they just duplicated a duplicate article

This is why mass article spamming fails. There are better ways to promote a website. There is so much of this going on and likely a strong penalty attached.

It's pointless.

[Go60Guy]

Having benefited nicely from article submissions to the better directories, I hold a different view than that set forth by the previous poster. It's just one strategy in the traffic and link generating arsenal, but, IMO an important one.