There’s quite a bit of hype about submitting articles to article submission sites, but are the benefits really that great? First off, we ought to review some of the advantages of submitting articles.

1. There are some nice tools available that automate a great deal of the article submission process.
2. Most sites that you can submit articles to allow for an author’s resource box in which you can place backlinks, thus providing one-way backlinks to your site.
3. The ArticleDashBoard article sites have RSS syndication functionality, so your article may be picked up for syndication.
4. Your article may also be used as content for other sites, and with the author’s resources box intact, you will again get one-way backlinks.
5. You have control over the content of the page your link is posted on and the category your article is placed in, thus ensuring a theme-relevant backlink.

Ok, from a SEO perspective the advantages above look really promising. But, unfortunately, there is a downside. Here are a few reasons why submitting articles may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

1. Article submission sites are growing incredibly fast because of the above reasons, but each article must be reviewed before it’s accepted. Article submission webmasters find themselves overwhelmed with the submission load. Because of this load they’re finding it easier and easier to decline articles, especially articles submitted via an automated solution. So, getting your article approved is getting a lot harder, at least with automated tools.
2. Because of the growth of some of these article sites, search engine spiders are taking a lot longer to index the new pages. So you’ll find that getting the article up is one thing, getting it indexed so your backlink is in Google’s cache is another.
3. Once the page your article is placed on is indexed it’ll probably take months before that page ever gets Google Page Rank, if ever. The reason why it may never get Page Rank is because most article submission sites do not work on their own backlinks, and with few links pointing to a site, it may never get decent Page Rank. However, if you submit your articles to http://www.articledashboard.com you will not have this problem as they have hundreds of sites pointing to them via the “powered by Article Dashboard” links.
4. Another thing that concerns me about submitting articles is that it creates duplicate content. I can’t imagine that it’d be very hard for Google to figure out all the article backlinks and devalue them.
5. And finally, article submission sites create a footprint that I think would be easy to track with Google’s algorithm. I would imagine that one-way backlinks obtained through article submission sites are not worth as much as one-way backlinks from relevant sites.

Ok, that’s some of the good, the bad and the ugly of article submissions. I have not personally seen any significant jump in the SERPs because of article submissions. I have submitted to hundreds of them. Maybe they just need to age a bit more- I hope. If not, Google may have them all figured out and those backlinks may be worth a lot less than people think.

If you want an awesome article submission tool I would recommend Article Distributor. If you want to try an automated solution I would recommend articlesender.com

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006 at 8:45 am and is filed under Link Popularity, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.