Beat practise: Article submission

So there are different opinions here about whether or not article submission works. I say try it and see for yourself. In the past two weeks, I submitted 2 articles to about 400 article directories, for a total of about 800 submissions.

Since then, my traffic has increased. My SERP positions for my keywords has grown slightly, but the bulk of these articles have yet to be indexed.

I know that people will say that these articles (and links) will go supplemental and that is true. But to me, it doesn't matter. A link from a supplemental page is still a link. Of course I would like to get links from extremely popular sites with huge traffic and high PR, but that is difficult and expensive to do.

Try article submissions yourself. I may not "get it", all I know is the results that I am getting from article submission have been positive....even in the past couple of weeks. Keep in mind too that not all SEO methods work for every site. Some sites may see good results from one technique, while other sites do not see the same positive results.

 

What are the Best Directories to submit your articles too?

 

Well, not really, there aren't too many people with differing ideas of whether article marketing works. There are people who know from experience and people who quote from authorities. Those with experience are all singing the same tune.

A link from the supplemental index is NOT the same as any other link. In fact you get no juice at all from supplemental index links. And guess what more of your articles will get deleted than actually even end up in the supplemental index.

The problem is my friend that you've listened to what all the gurus have told you, and you don't have enough experience to know what will happen. I've been doing article marketing for almost eight months. I did the same thing you did. I paid someone to submit to 400-500 directories. I spun articles every which way, mixing and matching paragraphs. I posted to my website first and waited for it to get indexed by google before posting on article directories.

And it used to work pretty well. I would get some traffic, I would get bumps up in the SERPs and it would last for months. Now however things are totally different Google is much more efficient at weeding out duplicate content, and they are much faster too. Takes about a month more or less.

Let me put it this way. Give it two months. You can PM me your article that you sent to 400 directories. If more than 10% of them stay out of the supplemental index. I'll pay you $100 paypal. It's a sucker bet really because I know for a fact that it won't happen. You'll be lucky to have more than 2-3 stay out. And usually the only ones that make it are blogs.

Do some research man, figure it out for yourself. Look at what other people have done. I posted extensively on it here:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=333437&page=2

You can do the same. And I could do it over and over and over again for many different people. But more importantly I have seen it in my own business, I know what I did, and what the effects were over time. You will too, just give it a few weeks.

M

 

I am posting my experience, and I respectfully disagree with you.

This is quite an assumption on your part. I have done article distribution for more than 2 years. All I can comment on is the results that I have seen.

That is exactly what I was suggesting to the original poster.

In a few weeks I may see some different results. I will just have to wait and see.

My message to others reading this is to simply try it for themselves and see what works for their individual site.

 

Great, if you've been article marketing for two years, then you must have some articles that have been out there for a while. Give me an example, show me all the examples of your articles that are not in the supplementary index. I'll do it if you like.

That's the thing, I have yet to see anyone PROVE that article marketing works today, right now, May 2007. Maybe you can prove me wrong, and show me how to article market correctly.

M

 

Submit one article to about 30-40 ezines (there are only about 30-40 good ones left). Change the article up a bit, change the title for sure between each, and then let her go. Great content, as always, should stay on your web site, not posted for free on the ezines.

 

No wonder you have such a piss poor attitude about articles. You are writing one article every 10-15 minutes??? Wow.

I spend an average of 3-5 hours to write a single article, and I can type 115 words per minute. Writing articles is not about how fast you type. It is about how well you can tell your story.

Ignore my sig file, because I am biased. But I am going to take on your challenge. I know you already know it all, so what I will have to say is probably very much pointless, but I enjoy the exercise.


I tried to do some research, but Marc Roman is not a pen name that seems to be used in EzineArticles like you suggested. I looked three different ways and could not turn up an article you have written. So, either you are writing such poor quality that you would not want to put your own name on it, or you really do not submit articles to EzineArticles.

There are a few essential directories where you should submit your articles, and http://www.EzineArticles.com is definitely one of those. Other readers should also include:

http://www.GoArticles.com
http://www.ArticleDashboard.com
http://www.Articles-Galore.com
http://www.ArticleCube.com
http://www.ArticleSnatch.com

There are more of course, but these make six of the best that will not cost you any money to use.

If I followed "your" expert advice, I would never see my articles published in great online ezines like SiteProNews or SEO-News. They do not take their articles from article directories, even if they do own GoArticles.com.

These articles have been very profitable for me:
http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2007/apr/27.html - No PR yet
http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2007/feb/12.html - PR4
http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2006/may/31.html - PR4
http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2006/may/12.html - No PR
http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2006/mar/31.html - PR4

http://www.seo-news.com/archives/2007/may/17.html - Published last week, no PR
http://www.seo-news.com/archives/2007/feb/8.html - PR5

All of these are duplicate pages, because all of the articles were published on my website first. And wow, I have still managed to get Google Main Index pages out of the deal.

But, your argument is that in the last month or so, all of this has changed. So according to your guidelines, all of this is old news with no future.

So, let me pull up a couple recent articles that have not officially earned PR by the Google Toolbar just yet.

I will review Understanding the Challenges of the Link Building Game, published on my site on 5-15-07 and published on SiteProNews and in SEO-News on 5-17-07.

I will also review Green With Envy in the Google Game, published on my site on 4-25-07 and on SiteProNews on 4-27-07.

First, Understanding the Challenges of the Link Building Game, which is less than 8 days old:

Google shows placement of the article title on 68 pages. Only three of those listing show up in Supplementals. Only 6 of the listed pages actually contain the article with my link back to my website, and the rest of the listings generally point to my article in one of the six shown pages. None of the supplemental listings are among the six showings of my article being referenced.

The six pages I am counting for this article are:
http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/articles/2007/0517.html
http://www.seo-news.com/archives/2007/may/17.html
http://www.myarticlemall.com/Article/Understanding-The-Challenges-Of-The-Link-Building-Game/22564
http://www.thephantomwriters.com/free_content/db/p/the-link-building-game.shtml
http://www.keywordtext.com/pudding/45.html
http://cc4marketing.com/?p=11

It is really hard to call the success of an article 8 days out from its initial completion. But the article is showing good signs of future success.


The second article, Green With Envy in the Google Game, was written four weeks ago:

Google shows 61 results for the title of the article.

Of those listings, these are the pages that actually have the article on them, and not just a reference to the article:

http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Search-Engines/Green-With-Envy-In-The-Google-Game.html
http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2007/apr/27.html
http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/articles/2007/0425.html
http://www.keywordtext.com/pudding/42.html
http://www.rk-web.net/weblog/index.php?itemid=326&catid=11 - Supplemental
http://www.thephantomwriters.com/free_content/db/p/green-with-envy.shtml
http://www.adventdigital.net/ArticlesDetails.asp?id=150 - Supplemental
http://www.mainstreamwebmasters.com/article1350.html
http://www.hashemian.com/articles/2007/04/25/green-with-envy-google-game.htm

So, in this case, we have 9 copies of the article in place on 9 different pages, and Google is only counting 2 of those as supplemental listings.


Most people who try out article marketing do so with the idea that article marketing is only about getting links. For me, it is not, but links do provide a great bonus.

I get my articles published in ezines all over the net, and while some people pooh-pooh ezines, I am pleased to see a few hundred or few thousand extra visitors to my sites as a result of publication of my articles in ezines. It is not uncommon for the publication of one of my articles to generate five figures in transactions as a result of that article.

You guys can play article marketing as strictly a link building game if you want, but for me, I want that ezine traffic too!

Now, don't get me wrong. I do utilize article marketing as a link building method for the purposes of increasing my seo presence in Google and the other search engines, and I happen to do it pretty well.

With my websites, I generally target two- to three-dozen keyword combos. I rank #1 in many of those, top 3 in others, page one in even more. Generally, with my moving keyword targets, I see 50% of my targets on page one at any one time, and the other 50% have been targeted from deep in the search results for improvement. One particular I am targeting at the moment was a keyword combo that was sending me traffic from page 7. I have focused on that keyword for a few weeks now, and I am climbing at a nice rate. It may take me six months, but that high-power keyword will eventually deliver my site on page one, perhaps even in the #1 spot.


I have been doing this for myself since 1999. I have been doing the article distribution for clients since 2001. And, I have been doing the article marketing for guaranteed link building customers since 2004.

I get great results.

You have been doing this article marketing thing for seo for a couple years, and you are getting terrible results. So my guess is that although you know it all, you probably don't know how to do article marketing well.

I have made some proof available to you here. Perhaps you will accept it as proof, or claim that my proof is not solid enough as you have done with other posters.

So, which of these two comments is more accurate:

1. Article marketing for seo purposes does not work, or
2. I have not yet been able to make article marketing for seo purposes work for me and my clients.

I will trust your judgment as to the actual correct answer here. You obviously know more about this issue than the rest of us, so we will yield to your final answer on the topic.

 

I submitted a lot of articles. Some of them are just submitted to 20-30 sites, most of them are submitted to hundreds of sites (400-500). According to the results I got, the best choice is:
1) submit to as many sites as you can;
2) use a different title for each submission. i.e. if you submit to 200 sites, it is better to use a different title for each site. do NOT just simply replace 1 or 2 words in the original title. use a Different title;
3) use a different resource box description;
4) for article itself, rewrite it for each site. but you don't have to rewrite it totally. Just use some software, change some sentences/paragraph/words, it is good enough. Of course, you should keep the article human readable. not just some random words replacement.


bear

 

I also think google might will just consider the article from main articles directories not the small one. so that will decrease the duplicateleel a bit.

 

It's funny how you've chosen to twist what I've said. I was pretty clear I believe.
1. Submitting to dozens, or hundreds of article directories isn't going to do you much good.
2. They can sometimes be helpful if they get picked up off of one of the article directories.
3. They are not a very good source of backlinks.
4. You'll see a slow buildup of articles being spread across the internet and then most of them will start to disappear and fall out of the index or go supplemental.

I do however like it when they get picked up by sources OTHER than the directories. I agree with you that ezine traffic can be nice. But most people aren't writing articles to get picked up by ezines these days they are doing it because they think that they can get cheap/easy backlinks.

I'm pretty much going to ignore the articles you posted as they are too new and the full effects of google's indexing cannot yet be determined, but if you want to go take a look back at it in a month of so I'm sure we can.

So I looked up some of your articles to see how they were doing. Here's an example:

"The Free-Reprint Articles Powerhouse and Copyright Law"

http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Free-Reprint-Articles-Powerhouse-and-Copyright-Law&id=111584

I see the article listed on your website, but it appears that Google isn't even indexing it on your website.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...ters.com/free_content/w/p/copyright_law.shtml

The next site is Kirkhamgate.net, and let's see.... oh yeah that one's dropped from Google's index too.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=http://www.kirkhamgate.net/webknowledge/1freereprint.html

And the list continues, no articles anywhere on opentopia.com, articlespawner.com, lordgomer.com, until I finally get to

http://www.directoryniche.co.uk/article25741.html

But upon closer inspection this article is significantly different to the ezinearticles article. One is 781 words, the other is 1189 words. Changing the article is one way of staying in the google index. But, with only 7 total views, 1 of them being mine, and it being on a PR 0 page with no link back to any of your domains I doubt it's helping you too much.

This one:

http://kissablefrog.com/art-creative/article983.htm

Well, it survived but they stripped you of any links as well. So, once again no help there.

I had a hard time finding any instances of an article that survived. Let's look for another one then. A more recent one.

"LURKERS and BABBLERS and the Make-Up of Your Subscriber Base "

Now the first one is here on www.selfseo.com and it's good and indexed. PR2 page, looking good.

Next entry:

http://www.talk-mania.com/archive/index.php/t-488.html is not the article, just sends you back to Self-seo.com

And then on your website where the article is actually indexed. So, that's good.

Your next entry: http://articles.sakshay.in/Category/146.html does a redirect and tries to install drive cleaner on your PC. Nasty.

Then a bunch of sites like listbuilderpro.com, echievements.com and so forth where your article isn't even indexed in google. And then going down further, you can see a bunch of article directories where the articles are in the supplemental index, ezinearticles, articlehub, articleplanets, etc.


And that's what I mean Bill. If you can't keep your own articles indexed or out of the supplemental index then how are you doing it for any of your other clients.

I looked at other of your articles that you've "article marketed" with the same results.

Ten Things Harry Potter Has Over Hillary Rodham-Clinton

Pull Technology Takes Your Ezine Off of the Spam Wars Battlefield

Temptations, White Lies, Sales and Seeing Eye Dogs

And the story is always the same, Google somehow picks one article to keep in it's index and for the most part throws most of the rest out. Nothing you've said has made me believe otherwise. Your own articles that you submitted prove my case. But, only you know best Bill, how many places have you submitted the above articles?

Now, I do think Articles can be good if you're just getting traffic, and if you can get it in a good place/ezine/blog. I just think the conventional wisdom of writing a good/great article and placing it everywhere you can is not doing anyone much good.

However on your website you state this:

And yet you're not taking advantage of this for your own articles, your own articles have maybe 10-30 instances of it showing up, and just a handful of actual examples that survived the supplemental index or the complete google cut.


So Bill you were quick to point out that you have 8 years of experience doing this. And I am not a very good article marketer. Yet you're still experiencing the exact same effects I was describing. Can you please clear that up for me?

From looking at the few articles you have posted as examples, and reading what you have said. It appears to me you went to a non-article directory and submitted your content. Does that about cover it? How would you recommend that most people on this website accomplish the same? I have done the same, I like to go to relevant sites and contribute my article to their site or blog in exchange for a link. It's not very time effective however. And how replicated by the members of this board. I guess I don't understand why you state that everyone here should use ezinearticles, goarticles, articledashboard etc when you're not using them for the single instances of your articles that do survive the duplicate filter. So, why should we do what so obviously doesn't work for you, when you're not exactly forthcoming about what you've done for your own articles?

I'm not trying to be arrogant or a know-it-all. But, that research I just did on your website is exactly what I'm seeing with my own articles. Which of us is the crappy writer/ marketer? Or is it what I have said all along that Google does a pretty good job of filtering out duplicate material?

M

 

I readily admit that many of my articles go into supplemental....like I said before, that is ok with me.

For me the bottom line is do I get a boost in traffic and SERP's after submitting an article?

For me, the answer has been yes...even in recent weeks. The increase in traffic and the bumps in the SERP's is the proof that I have seen.

 

Get few unique articles written and post them to selected few directories.
Write one very general and blast it across a ton of directories.
Do few at a time.
Vary your anchor links.

It's worked like charm for me.

~G

 

I took your challenge.

So, you only want May 2007 results if they will prove your point. I see how this works now.


Let me tell you a funny story about Inbound Links or IBL's. If you pull up my thephantomwriters website in google and do a backlink check, you will see 42 IBL's. If you had my password to get into Google's webmaster tools, they give me credit for 5,000 inbound links. If you had the password to my internal site stats, you would see that I received traffic directly from 16,000 webpages in 2006 that were linked to my website.

In 2006, 42% of my 144,000 unique visitors came from Google. Another 8% came from Yahoo. 7% came from another 37 search engines and the bulk of that number came from Ask and Msn. That leaves another 43% of 144,000 unique visitors who came from pages that had copies of my 101 articles, a few posts in forums, and bookmarks.

I am at 124,000 unique visitors this year, and it is only May 23rd. I know these numbers are low when compared to some bigger sites, but it does reflect the continuously growing traffic I see on my own domains.

Even if 90% of the page I develop are in the Supplementals, humans do read Supplemental pages, even if they are not in the search results.

We still do not know what kind of articles you write. But I am solely focused on writing articles that human beings will want to read.


People get lost in this magical IBL number. That is your whole point of discussing Supplemental results. Supplemental results are considered Google Hell by many of you. You feel that once your pages and links slip into Supplemental, then you feel that you have wasted your time.

Matt Cutts has defined Supplemental Results as pages that have no PageRank. When an article is placed for the first time, it is a new page on the internet, therefore it will absolutely have a PR0 when the article is placed.

I have never denied that. This is why I advise people that article marketing is a long-term play and not a short-term play.

So of course, pages may enter the Main Index now, then slip into Supplemental later. But that does not mean that articles cannot come out of Supplementals at some future point. To get a page out of Supplementals and back into the Main Index, the page simply needs to get its own PageRank.

I tell my own customers that we measure the pages that will eventually have PageRank in percentages. Not all pages will acquire PageRank, not even most of them. But, enough pages will acquire PageRank to make it worthwhile.

Yes, I did update some of my articles to reflect changes in the Internet landscape. That is the case here. It was done for human readers, not for Google. If I benefited in Google from that action, then great. But, that is not the reason I had done so.

You keep suggesting that the only reason people would do article marketing is for the sake of Google. I don't. I do it to attract human readers. Google has never spent a dime on my website, but people do every day.

It happens on occasion. Thus another argument some people point at as a reason not to do article marketing. "People steal stuff." Yes, some do.

And when it happens, you have to ask yourself an important question. Do you want to spend your time chasing crooks who steal your copyrighted materials, or do you want to keep producing new materials and keep moving forward?

If I were to chase the thieves, I could spend all my days never getting anything else done. When I stumble into examples of such, I do pursue a correction or removal. But, I don't actively go looking to find the bad eggs on the web.

Yes, another bad egg.

You only took a cursory glance at my website I see.

No where on thephantomwriters does it state that I will guarantee placement of an article on 17,000 websites. No where.

I reach 17,000 (actually more than 30,000 now) publishers and webmasters by "email", who have a CHOICE as to whether they will want to use your article or not. These are NOT direct placement on article directories or article websites.

As always, there are high/low/and average results for the placement of an article.

Great placement can number in the thousands of sites, but those are very few and far, far between. I have only seen two articles reach beyond 1,000 mentions according to Google. Placement on 30-50 sites is average.

Wow, the articles of mine that you chose to reference show 10-30 Main Index listings and a few supplementals in Google. So, I have written a few "average" articles myself. They cannot all be winners.

The "Ten Things Harry Potter Has Over Hillary Rodham-Clinton" was actually only published on three websites and published in three ezines, but who cares? I did it because I thought it was funny. And a few other people thought it was funny too.

I have said it before, and I will say it again. I write for human beings and not for search engines. When was the last time Google spent money on my websites?

People asked for free places to submit. I suggested based on the directories that publishers and webmasters also use to pick up articles.

If someone posted an article on articledashboard for example, and it was picked up by another webmaster for placement on their site, and that new placement of the article sent hundreds of visitors a month to the author's website, of which a certain percentage would buy what the author is selling (we all convert a certain amount of traffic to sales), then that useless page in Supplementals at articledashboard could still be making you money.

In the end, it is not about the main index or the supplementals, it is about how many people come to your website and buy what you are selling.

On thephantomwriters, I am distributing articles for my clients for placement in ezines and backlinks. These are backlinks that my client's manage to pick up reside on pages that in most cases human beings will actually read and use to visit my clients' websites.

If I am helping my clients to make money by distributing their articles, then my service will pay for itself. If they do not make money as a result of their article marketing efforts, maybe they need to do PPC or something else to get traffic to their websites.

I have article distribution clients that have been with me for years. I can only assume they keep coming back, because the efforts I am making on their behalf are helping them to make money.


On LinksAndTraffic, we do article marketing with the express purpose of influencing placement inside of Google search results. Once again, results speak louder than you do.

I won't tell you my clients targeted keyword phrases or many of my own targeted keyword phrases, because my client's competitors and my competitors do not need to see the information we use to build our businesses.

One of my recent LinksAndTraffic customers is in a fairly competitive market. Before he used my LinksAndTraffic guaranteed links program, he did not even finish in the top 100 results for the five keyword phrases we targeted in the campaign. When the campaign was done, his five keyword phrases rose from between results 100 to 200 in Google, to #1, #1, #17, #17 and #31.

The only person I needed to show the precise details to was my client, and he was happy with the outcome of his campaign.

Many of the links we built are still in Supplementals, but those Main Index pages and Supplemental pages helped push his website up in the search results. Regardless of Supplemental status, he is still receiving more traffic to his website and more sales. So, my client is going to do it again.

Okay, I will throw you one bone. On thephantomwriters, all of my competitors already know that I do target the keyword phrase "Article Distribution." Out of 185 million results found, I am in the #1 spot.

#1 makes me more money than #11, and I am sure it does for you too.

I don't get lost in endless processions about the Main Index versus the Supplemental Index. I don't chase those kinds of metrics. For websites that do, maybe they should go to my competitors. But, when a webmaster is interested in having me help them to climb in the search results from no where to some where, I can help. When they want to get to page one of the results or #1, all of those things are within reach. For some folks getting to page one of the Google results is a tad more expensive than for others, but that depends on how well trenched the competition is before we begin.

While you worry about Supplementals and PageRank, I will keep my focus on where we are at in the search results and keep pushing to improve upon our current positions in the results.

 

Man, I don't know how you guys can type so much!

So here is a question for Bill and Marc: Is it best to post any article that I write myself on my own sites first before I submit them to a directory? How long should I wait to do that?

 

This has turned out to be a nice thread... Some good info thanks guys!

 

Bill,

You can't change the definition of the argument to try to suit your purposes, it just doesn't work that way. We can't have a meaningful discussion if you're going to keep changing the basis of the discussion.

I'm talking about Article Marketing for SEO purposes. Period. I have already expressed numerous times that Articles can be great for traffic when they are picked up by ezines and blogs. But, for long term SEO practices they aren't of much use.

Let me give you two examples.

1. A local computer repair company that I was doing article marketing for. Shot up to #3, #1, #5 for his main keywords solely from Directory Submissions, and Article Marketing. One of the articles got picked up by a PR5 very popular technical blog. And had a bunch of comments, etc. We got some traffic from it, but it was meaningless because they weren't local. But, it really helped the SERPS. Google recognized it as a link in the webmaster tools, Yahoo recognized it as the most popular link etc. Then just a few weeks ago, the blog article went supplemental and finally was dropped from the index. And for your reference it wasn't that it was archived, it wasn't. It was Wordpress blog with a separate page for every entry. So, I got two months of pretty good rankings off of the articles. But, now we've slidden down the rankings to #33, #29, #89. This directly corresponds to a series of articles that we had submitted to 200 article directories, seeing them all get indexed and then watching them get weeded out and put in the supplemental index.

2. A local attorney that I was doing SEO for. I approached his article marketing a little differently. I took an article and I personally marketed it to other attorney websites. I was able to place 9 articles on different websites. These websites range from PR5 to PR2. This website went from ranking nowhere in the listings to #3, #2, #5 for the keywords. And the best part is it will stay there, because the articles aren't going to go supplemental or booted out of the index.

Now, I have stated above in my previous posts that articles can be good for getting traffic if you get on a good popular blog or website. However, for both of my clients above how would you suggest I can use article marketing if not for purely inbound links and SEO purposes. It wouldn't really do a Tulsa Auto Mechanic much good to have someone in Sidney or London read his articles on "21 Most common ways mechanics rip you off".

Well, what is worthwhile Bill, how are you defining it? I know you said that on those articles I pulled up you had 10-20 Main Index listings. I just don't see it that way. I see 1-2 listings max.Yes your article is mentioned on sites like ArticleDashboard by title, but the actual article itself isn't even indexed in Google. What does that tell you? And because Supplemental Results have no Page Rank they aren't a source of search engine value. Even a PR 0 page has some increment of rankings. Most Ezine Article pages pass some PR. But, they are worthless FOR SEO once they slip into the supplemental index or are dropped from the index altogether.

Did you read what I wrote Bill? Did you actually look at the listings? Because mentioning it on a site like listbuilderpro.com as content but not even having the actual article itself indexed, where a backlink to your website exists doesn't really constitute something of value to me. Having the title to my article out there doesn't do me any good, just the indexed article with the links back to my site. I like your writing, I think it's informative and very good. But, I just don't know that distributing it as a business model for SEO purposes or link building is very beneficial.

And that's my problem Bill, is the marketing of your Article Distribution as a source of link development. When your typical article that you've used for yourself has been relegated to the trash heap of Supplemental Indexes or dropped from the index altogether.

I didn't pull mediocre articles on purpose, in fact I thought they were all very good, I just started pulling them at random. And shouldn't that really be the test Bill for a company. Don't tell me your best case, or even your worst case, give me the average example as that is what I can expect.

So, let's make sure we define ourselves here Bill because I want to be clear. Articles as a form of Marketing I'm fine with. I think it can and does work. I use Articles, videos, webinars, audios etc to bring in business. Articles as Link Development or SEO I feel does NOT work. You don't have to prove to me that articles as a pure marketing tool works, I've seen it for myself. I have a set of videos on Youtube that consistenly pulls me in $30 a day in affiliate sales. And has done so for months. I also make a few hundred bucks a month Bum Marketing. But, what I've found is that at least for Bum Marketing purposes, I got no real benefit from putting my articles out on 100 directories than if I did just ezine articles. 90%+ of my traffic comes directly from EzineArticles.

My challenge was pretty simple. Show me an article that was widely distributed that more than 10% of the submissions stayed out of the supplemental index after two months. That's why I didn't count your newly submitted articles. If you can show me a way to do that, I'd be the first to hire your company. But, keep in mind, I could care less about the traffic from the article itself. I really just want the links. For 99% of my customers. I do have some that could use the traffic from the article though.

Now one method I have found that works is using article marketing as link bait. I've had some moderate success with that. I have a client that is a Yoga instructor. Once again a local niche market. She put some of her videos up on website and then started driving articles to her videos. And then she found people were finding her article, going to her website, seeing her content, and then blogging/linking to the website naturally. I can see that your excellent articles would probably achieve the same aim.

What my issue is and remains is the question that was first asked here, I have a single article, for SEO purposes should I submit to 1 directory or 300. My answer remains the same. I wouldn't bother taking the time to submit the articles to all those directories, as I think the time could be better spent creating more content. Rewriting the same article differently etc. From looking at your articles that you have "distributed" I would have to say my answer would still be the same.

M

 

Yes. I can type 115 wpm. And everyone tells me I talk way too much.

It is best to put it on your site first, and then to wait for a couple weeks until the GoogleBot has crawled your site.

Whoever Google tags as being the first website to publish, that website becomes the "authority" website for that article.

Some people wait until they see the article in Google's page cache, before they distribute. Others just wait a week before distribution. And I do neither. I write it and submit it. It will go on my site a few hours before everyone else's site, and sometimes Google will find it on my site first and at other times, they will find it somewhere else first.

I don't worry about the little things...

 

You did it. Let me reiterate:

You changed the definition of the argument yourself. And now you are telling me that I cannot do so.

You are a funny guy. "Do as I say, not as I do." Right?

I am almost certain that I did address your question in regards also to SEO. Oh wait. I am not "almost certain", I am "absolutely certain" I did.

I guess you did not like my answer. So, perhaps you trying to nullify my comments by saying that I did not answer your questions?


Okay. So you want May 2007 proof.

Oh wait. No, you don't want that. Let's re-examine that in two months when it is meaningful.

You are chasing ghosts here. In your mind, the only thing useful about articles is the occasional traffic you get from those articles. You believe that they are pointless as a SEO tool. Because articles have never proven a long-term value for your clients, you say that no one should use them as a tool.

You are the authority. If it does not work in your case, it will not work in any cases. That is your argument.

You have an axe to grind. It did not work for you, and you are pissed. So, you will argue till you are blue in the face with everyone who dares to contradict your wisdom.

Okay, I can accept that. It did not work out for you, and I am sorry.

We live in the "immediate gratification" generation. Everybody wants immediate results and immediate proof.

Article marketing is not a tool for the "immediate gratification" marketer. It can take 3-6 months before people start to experience positive results from the process. I said before that this is a long-term play, not a short-term play.


The only difference between your comments and mine are that you are framing article marketing in terms of their relationship to the Supplementals. I am framing article marketing based on results in SEO. Okay, I will play both sides. First, some background:

Article Marketing

Some articles produce real results. Some articles fall flat. By my calculations, I write one winner for every three I write. I have always told MY clients that if they want a true measure of their article campaigns, they should take their measurements based on seven articles, never just one.

In your previous post, you pulled a mix of my articles and saw mixed results. From a mix of articles, I always expect mixed results. One should never judge an article campaign based on one article. The reasons are many:

1. The webmasters who would want to publish your article may miss your article when it is distributed.
2. The webmaster may see your article, but not have the time to post it right away, and then forget about it by the time when they can do it.
3. The webmaster or publisher may have already used their scheduled number of articles for the week.
4. You may have had stiff competition for the week, and your article just did not make the grade.
5. Your article may have been the right topic at the wrong time.
6. In an attempt to keep their author list diversified, you may have had another of your articles published there too soon previously.
7. Your article title simply may not have caught their eye.
8. If the article title caught their eye, the first paragraph may have fallen flat.
9. You may have not able to keep their attention for the full length of the article.
10. The Marketing Rule Of Seven states that a person needs to hear of a business or person seven times before they really start to pay attention. With your first few articles, you are just one writer in a huge crowd of writers. But once publishers and webmasters have seen your name 7 times, they feel as if they know who you are, without actually really knowing anything about you. It is simply the recognition factor. The recognition factor will encourage them to open your article, and if they like what they read, they may even go search your old stuff to see what they might also want to use, and they will look for your stuff in the future.

This list will attest to why people may not use an article that deserves wider attention. It also attests to the reason I never measure my own success based on the results of one or three of one hundred articles.

Supplemental Results

Supplemental pages are simply pages that do not possess PageRank. It is not a dead end road. Pages that are in the Supplemental Results can return to the Main Google Index, if they acquire PageRank at some future date.

When someone pulls a search term, Google will feed the Main Index pages first, and when they run out of Main Index listings for that search term, then they feed results from the Supplementals.

Depending on the search term and the number of results returned, you may get back ten main index pages and twenty supplemental results. Or you may get one thousand main index listings and no supplementals. It simply depends on how many results are returned for the particular search in the main index.

Supplemental pages may receive some traffic from Google, but doing so is against the odds.

PageRank is frequently misunderstood. I would like to think that you understand the nature of PageRank, but from two of your previous statements, I am concerned that you do not. More for our other readers than for you, I am going to discuss PageRank for a minute.

PageRank defines the value of a Page according to Google. PageRank does not apply to an entire website; it only applies to a specific page on that website.

In order for a page to be taken out of Supplementals, the page must have its own PageRank. And to have its own PageRank, some page with its own PageRank must link to your page.

If you want to get a page out of the Supplementals, that is how to do it. Pass PageRank to the page, and then you will see the page come out of the Supplemental listings.

This is the specific reason why I frequently build deep links on all of my sites. I want as many inside links to my site to also have PageRank, in order to get those pages out of the Supplementals. Am I 100% effective in this regard? No, but I do not try for 100%. I pick the important pages and go from there.

I always try to employ a holistic approach to SEO. We don't want to strengthen only the front page of a website, but all of the important pages of a website.

Example Complaints

This is where I got the idea that you did not understand PageRank. So what if the blog is PR5? What is the PageRank of the page where the article was posted within the website? It started at zero. Where is it now? It is probably still zero, although it does happen that it might have gained PageRank in the time since you last looked at it.

New pages on the net get a pass for a few weeks, because they are new. As a new page, it is impossible for the page to have its own PageRank.

After a window of time has passed, if the page does not pick up any links from PageRank pages, it will slip into the Supplementals. Period. No PageRank ensures that the page will be moved into the Supplementals.

When those links were new and had their "pass" window open, your client saw results in the range of #3, #1, #5. After the pass window had closed, and those pages had not earned any PageRank of their own, there was no where for them to go but down. So your client slipped to #33, #29, #89.

Where was your client before the process began? If he is higher now than when he started, you did improve his standings.

As to the nature of the traffic not being local, that is your fault. You get to choose how to keyword the links, so why did you not keyword the links with terms that would apply to his local market?

If he is statewide, then use keyword combos like: "New York computer repair", "computer repair New York", "NY computer repair", "computer repair NY", "NYC computer repair", and "computer repair NYC".

If he is more local, then tag the city name and the county name with the description of his website.

If I am sitting in Oklahoma, which I am, and the link says "New York computer repair", I don't want to waste my time either.

Using the appropriate descriptions and keywords in the links, you can ensure that traffic gained from an article is more locally relevant, and more importantly, for seo purposes, you can ensure that your client can get search traffic from his specific target market.

Once again, you are treating every page on a website as if its front page PageRank is relevant to the PageRank of internal pages on that website.

Do the links actually appear on pages that have their own PageRank? If so, then yes, they will survive. If the internal pages of those sites, the pages that actually house your links, do not have their own PageRank, then your client's rating will not survive.

The survivability of those links have zero to do with the fact that it is an attorney article on an attorney website. Relevance is based on the page where the link is placed and where the link points. Are they similar? If so, then they are relevant.

If those attorney article pages do not have their own PageRank, they too will disappear into the Supplementals.

A Game of Percentages

Yes, a lot of my own pages are also in the Supplementals now. But there is always a chance for them to rise out of the Supp's, and if I can help them to do so, I will. Over time, a certain percentage of pages will rise out of Google Hell, when they have acquired their own PageRank.

Even if only 5% of my article pages come out of Supplementals, which after a few months, 5-10% is the average, I will end the day with more Main Index pages with links than you, because 5% of zero is still zero!

If my pages can do 10%, all the better. And your 10% of zero is still zero.

It is the law of averages. Just as we convert a certain number of people who visit our websites, a certain number of our article placements will gain their own PageRank and exit the Supplemental listings or Google Hell as it is called.

The truth of the SEO effectiveness of articles is not in counting Supplemental percentages. The truth of SEO effectiveness of articles is in the SERPs.

Can keyworded inbound links developed through articles increase a person's ranking in the search engines?

I threw you a bone yesterday. I told you one of my target keywords is Article Distribution, and my site ranks #1 of 185 million results on that keyword phrase.

I have another bone for you.

I will not share my actual keywords with you, but I will go through a list of them and tell you how I rank. This is pertinent to the discussion, because with the exception of a few posts in forums like this and a few referrals here and there, I only use article marketing to develop my search rankings for my own sites.

Drum Roll please...

The link shown above is one keyword phrase I target and how it places in the results. I always run these numbers also showing the number of search results connected to that keyword, because someone suggested one time that it was easy to compete with one hundred sites.

These results are shown in alphabetical order, without the actual keyword, and instead the number of words in the search phrase. After the one keyword phrase I gave you previously, here are the results connected to our Top 50 Keywords for thephantomwriters.com:

3 words - #4 of 119 million results
3 words - #1 of 131 million results
3 words - #1 of 131 million results
3 words - #8 of 45 million results
3 words - #2 of 1.6 million results
3 words - #1 of 1.6 million results
2 words - #1 of 359,000 results
2 words - #86 of 229 million results
3 words - #4 of 42 million results
3 words - #12 of 231 million results
3 words - #5 of 147 million results
2 words - #93 of 533 million results
2 words - #1 of 42 million results
3 words - #2 of 23 million results
3 words - #2 of 23 million results
2 words - #22 of 8 million results
3 words - #2 of 44 million results
2 words - #12 of 65 million results
2 words - #1 of 39 million results
4 words - #3 of 10 million results
3 words - #4 of 102 million results
3 words - #3 of 102 million results
3 words - #2 of 32 million results
3 words - #42 of 62 million results
3 words - #8 of 7 million
2 words - #21 of 38 million
3 words - #18 of 1.1 million
2 words - #3 of 5 million results
2 words - #3 of 123 million results
3 words - #5 of 125 million results
4 words - #1 of 75 million results
4 words - #5 of 25 million results
3 words - #96 of 16 million results
3 words - #33 of 5 million results
3 words - #13 of 8 million results
3 words - #2 of 1.6 million results
3 words - #11 of 3.5 million results
3 words - #5 of 1.4 million results
2 words - #28 of 1.8 million results
3 words - #1 of 1.6 million results
2 words - #19 of 4 million results
2 words - #1 of 300,000 results
3 words - #4 of 2 million results
3 words - #3 of 1.6 million results
2 words - #16 of 350,000 results
2 words - #19 of 322,000 results
2 words - #3 of 42 million results
3 words - #7 of 1.3 million results
4 words - #1 of 19 million results

Yes, some need work. Others are well set. If article marketing did not work for SEO purposes, then you would NOT see these kinds of results for my website.

Most of these keywords were set up through article marketing campaigns designed to target our keywords. Simple as that.

I tell my customers straight up that 85%-95% of their articles will fall into the Supplemental Results. Then 90-120 days out from the point of distribution, they will begin to note some of these article pages coming out of the Supplementals into the main index.

Either way, it is all a percentage game. And you cannot win if you do not play.

But if you can play the game well, you can rule the roost for your most important keyword searches inside the Google results.

Of the 51 keywords I documented for my website, I have 11 number one ranked keyword phrases. Out of 51 keyword phrase, I have 34 in the top ten results. That is a full two-thirds of my keywords on Page One of Google's search results.

So, let me ask every one reading today. What is more important? Counting the number of article pages that have slipped into the Supplemental Results and have not yet come out of the Supplementals, OR is it more important to count how many of your relevant keyword phrases are on Page One of Google's search result pages?

Have a nice Memorial Day Weekend everybody.

 

p.s. Link bait is an awesome method if you can find the right bait for your website, at a price you can afford.

That is where the rub is. People may have the mindset for creating a great link bait idea that might work, but not all know how to make it happen. Link bait can cost a great deal of money. A friend of mine paid five grand for a java-powered link bait that was very effective for her niche.

I build a decent link bait a few years ago, and I have received quite a bit of traffic from the effort. But, I spent two days programming. And as many have told me, they cannot program.

But, if you can afford it, and you can design a link bait that really works, then you will have hundreds of links coming your way at no cost to you.

 

Thanks for the informative posts bill your obviously good at what you do.