Hi. Articles Directories / Webiste are considered to be best source to submit your web articles and great tool for link building too. I wanted to know how are they useful to the webmasters. I mean they provide really great content free to publish on your site. But are they Effective ??? In terms of SE results In terms of Quality content In terms of Usefullness to Your Targetted Visitors.
Search engines know that the content is heavily duplicated. At the very least you need to change it slightly e.g. by marking-up certain terms, creating auto-summaries or combining similar content (in ways that add value - not random!)
If you add a paragraph will that be enough to keep it from being considered duplicate content by the search engines (G in particular)? Or is it likely to still end up in Google's suplemental index?
Article directories are useful to webmasters for both submitting and using the articles. If you are submitting articles, it is important that they are well written and interesting in order to be picked up by other sites. If your articles target less popular keywords and phrases in a given niche, then you will rank better in the search engines. But it is important to continue to submit new content/articles on a regular basis. Article directories are also beneficial to webmasters who want content, but are just not in the mood to write it all (or have it written). Add your own unique spin by commenting on the articles and occasionally adding some of your own content to your site also.
The funny thing with Google is this: if your article gets republished at a few sites, Google's duplicate filter will sometimes result in the deindexing of your article in the article directory. It has happened a few times with my articles in Ezinearticles.com. I submit lengthy articles to Ezinearticles with the intention for it to rank highly in the search engines, and they often do, only to randomly get deindexed a few months later. Update: Oops, I take that back - my article just got indexed again for the phrase http://www.google.com/search?source...06-23,GGGL:en&q=nikon+d80+recommended+lenses: http://ezinearticles.com/?Top-3-Rec...ur-New-Nikon-D80-Digital-SLR-Camera&id=293562