Can someone elaborate for me please the whole thing about writing articles to improve search engine rankings? Is the idea that people will use the articles just on their sites and therefore get a link to your site with maybe PR on it? Or that you will also get a link with PR on it from the article directory itself? And in either case, what about duplicate content and also Google possibly discounting links from these types of article directories? I just want to get clarification on this. I feel like everybody else knows what is going on here except me! Thanks, Jon
Hey Jon12345, hopefully I can shed some light for you. Article directories will help your site. The articles you write will appear on the Article site itself, and all other sites in syndicates to. People will also occasionally use the articles. You just need to make sure your links are in the article, with relevant anchor text. The links from article directories will carry a low value. They will also have a short lifespan in the SERPs. But, if you keep writing articles once in a while, there will always be links to your sites. I recommend writing articles, as any link will help your site. I wouldn't worry about the duplicate content either. Yes, they will be on multiple websites, but as long as you didn't copy an article from your website itself, it won't matter too much. Articles are always a good idea, but in conjunction with your other link building techniques. Do not use articles as your main link building tool.
It's a lot of work for what seems to be fairly little payoff... but I guess if your not rehashing the same old stuff you might get noticed...
Hundreds or even thousands of backlinks of article directories can help to increase PR of your webiste. This needs time up to 3 months to get higher PR for your website.
If you would like to learn a lot about this subject I recommend that you do a search here at DP. There are probably dozens of threads discussing this topic.