Is article submission dead? No, I don't thinks so. Is it less effective than it once was? Most certainly! Article submissions will always create a backlink for you, but that backlink may not do much for you if anything at all. The first thing to remember is that there are two aspects to backlinks: PR and traffic. Most webmasters focus on the PR a backlink will generate. This invariably creates questions like "if I submit my article to 1000 article directories, what page rank will I get?" The answer of course is that it all depends on the article directories. How well is it indexed, how many links are on each page, etc. Focusing on PR is an issue of pride. If you want the highest PR widget site, you focus on PR. On the other hand, if you want to retire early, you focus on the other aspect of backlinks: traffic. You can have a PR 8 site, but if it has no traffic, it won't generate an income. If income is not your primary motive, stop here and go build your high PR website. There's nothing wrong with taking pride in your site, and I'm as guilty as the next guy for drooling over a PR boost, but my primary goal is money. With that in mind, place the focus on how much traffic your article will generate. Spammy sales articles generate almost no traffic, while an article I wrote a while back that contained helpful and useful information got picked up by a large portal site (not /. dangit!) and nearly crippled my server. Writing quality articles is the key to generating traffic. Ok, I hear some of you grumbling (or maybe it;s just the voices in my head). You're thinking, "but if I build PR, the traffic will come because I'll have better SERPs". True, but did you ever think that the flip side was also true? If you build traffic, the links will come! This has never been more true thanks to Google's algo change to reduce the impact of Google Bombing. It's no longer easy to rank well for a search term just by getting a gazillion backlinks which all use that term. Instead, Google now looks for more natural linking patterns. That means Google likes to see some deep links and a wide variety of anchor text. How many times during your article submission do you change up your Author's Bio box? Only a couple if at all? Guess what, that makes your article less effective. This helps to explain why social bookmarking sites help so much: lots of users creating their own link to the resource. The other thing I want to point out is the myth of the duplicate content penalty surrounding article submissions. There is most certainly a penalty for having duplicate content, but that penalty is only applied if you duplicate content on your site. If you duplicate content on another site, you will force the search engine to try to figure out which site is the better resource for the duplicated content. One will be displayed in the SERP, the other will appear much lower or not at all. So, creating 1000 pages on your website with virtually identical content will garner you a penalty, but using an article from an article directory will only result in a contest to see who is the best resource for that content. Think of it this way. How many newpaper/radio station/tv station websites subscribe to the big news wires like the Associated Press? Do you suppose they sit down and decide who gets to publish the various news articles the AP puts out so they can avoid a duplicate content penalty? Of course not! Do you suppose Google turns a blind eye to their duplicate content shenanigans? Highly doubtful! Instead, isn't it much more likely that Google will try to decide which site would be the best resource for your search? Yep. That's why when you search for a particular news story, you can get multiple results. This same thing relates to articles. Search for the exact title of your article. Lot's of results, right? Now search for the general idea of your article. Only a few results that are your article, right? Google is attempting to show you what it considers are the best resources for your search. So, the ultimate moral of this story is that people who write good articles will win, but the winnings aren't as big as they once were.
there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty if there was then none of those article directories would appear in the search results. Its a filter not a penalty
Are you checking to see if people are using your articles, but removing the backlinks? I've had that happen a couple of times, but a polite email to the webmaster of the offending site usually sorts it out.
I have read in multiple places that getting backlinks in articles on multiple sites is pretty much dead. I think the best alternative is to get your article posted exclusively on just one site with a lot of traffic that you will get a backlink, plus lots of nice targeted traffic. For example, you write about web design. Become a featured writer for a web design related site. Make sure that you get credit for it on the site in the signature. Perhaps they will let you add some links in the article as well. Heck, they might even pay you to write the article.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/2006-pubcon-in-vegas-thursday-site-reviews/ http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003398.html http://www.webpronews.com/search/node/duplicate+content http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ses-nyc-2006-day-2/ There most certainly is a duplicate content penalty, as I'm sure you'll see if you read any of the above links. If you want to test this to make sure I'm telling the truth, take a domain you no longer want and write a script that spits out the exact same content with a different title no matter what URL is thrown at the domain. Make sure to return a 200 status, and fill the page with random links to other "pages" on your site. These links will of course go to the exact same content (except with a different title and url). You can quite easily write a script that generated billions of "pages" containing the exact same content. This is plain, simple, search engine spam, and the site will get delisted. Now, if you read what I wrote carefully, you'll see that I distinguish between the duplicate content penalty and the duplicate content filter. Having your article on hundreds of sites will not result in a penalty for anyone including yourself. It will result in the duplicate content filter kicking in however, and many of the pages that have your article will end up in the supplemental index (possibly including your own). This is not a penalty, even if it is an undesirable result. So, to summarize: Same content on multiple pages of one site = Penalty Some content on multipage sites = Filter
Well maybe you should go an do a bit of reading yourself http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/06/duplicate-content-summit-at-smx.html from the article written by the person in charge of Google Webmaster Central "A few months ago, Adam wrote a great post on dealing with duplicate content. The most important things to know about duplicate content are: * Google wants to serve up unique results and does a great job of picking a version of your content to show if your sites includes duplication. If you don't want to worry about sorting through duplication on your site, you can let us worry about it instead. * Duplicate content doesn't cause your site to be penalized. If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers. * Duplicate content doesn't cause your site to be placed in the supplemental index. Duplication may indirectly influence this however, if links to your pages are split among the various versions, causing lower per-page PageRank."
directory submissions have worked well for me and using my own members as gaining backlinks have also worked well for me...
Yea, article submission is great. Not only by getting a inbound link but by attracting visitors that can become interested in your site by reading.
Have you tried receive links or link vault? They are two of my favorites that I would add to your list above.
well is not about what you use is about the principle of exchange because google doesn't like it. Read: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-link-exchange-emails/ also google support about link exchange. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356&query=link+exchange&topic=&type after you read article maybe you will understand why I think link exchenge is not working
Straight from the horses mouth: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359 And Google isn't the only search engine that penalizes duplicate content: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-05.html To me, that clearly points out that creating an exact duplicate of any page (or site) will get you penalized. You're welcome to disagree based on Vanessa's information, but I think I'll stick to the officially published guidelines.