What to Watch out for When Submitting Articles to Directories

Submitting unique articles you've written to article directories, with a link to your website in a bio at the bottom of the page, used to be a good way to gain one-way links. However, most of those directories made you agree to let them offer those same articles for free to other directories and or website owners or to syndicate the article through their RSS feed. Google hates duplicates so it eliminated the benefit of submitting in most article directories.

Article Submissions can Cause a Penalty For the Following Reasons:

  1. Your website will be gathering links too fast from multiple article submissions which can result in a penalty, i.e. a drop in keyword rank.
  2. Your articles will also be using the same title on every website.
  3. Since 2012 Google started demoting the value of article directories when they published the same articles already on the Internet as it causes duplicate content spam and Google gets swamped with the same articles on multiple sites.
  4. In August 2013 Google started punishing author websites that had duplicate articles with keyword rich anchor text in links pointing at their websites.
  5. In October 2013 Google started punishing sites for posting articles around the internet with links to their site that contained keywords instead of the brand name in the anchor text.
  6. Google's Panda update targets sites that accept mass submission of articles.

Conclusion:

If you can find a website that is looking for guest writers that is relevant to your business, that will accept your article and not post it elsewhere, then it might help your rank. However only use your domain or business name as the anchor text in links or it could result in a Penguin Penalty if you do that too often.

The best way to market your article is to add it to your own website because every page you add to your own website, and the more links you have pointing back to your home page, increases your chance of ranking for related keywords.


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Also see:
Submission Scams

Lori Eldridge
Copyright © June 23, 2009 - Updated 11-04-20
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