SEOh My F**cking God!

Do Article Submission Sites Work For SEO?

Frank and I were discussing this topic yesterday, so I did some thinking and a bit of research.

Here is an article that Aaron Wall wrote last year:

And here is the Michael Grey post that inspired it:

I wish I could have uncovered something good that was a little more current, so let me know if any of you guys find anything. The valuable information is located in the comments sections of each article. The general consensus seems to be that automated, mass-submission to article directory sites is pretty worthless. I think we would all probably assume that anyway, so the real question becomes, “What, if any, is the value of submitting unique, keyword-rich content with back links to deep pages with good anchor text?” Given that Google did a PR revision of these article submission sites about a year ago, search engineers decided to knock the value of article submission down a peg or two resulting in PR3s or PR0s, according to Aaron and Michael. But I just checked the major submission sites that I know (and sometimes use), and the domain PRs breaks down like this:

• http://ezinearticles.com/ PR6
• http://www.articlecity.com/ PR6
• http://www.buzzle.com/ PR6
• http://www.articlebiz.com/ PR3
• http://www.easyarticles.com/ PR4

Not too shabby. So the owners of these sites have obviously taken a firmer stance on editorial guidelines, and the Google search engineers rewarded that jump in quality by restoring some or all of their PR. A comment that was repeated a number times in the above posts was that the real power of article submission services is not in the links that come directly from the submission sites themselves but from the other sites the syndicate/republish the content. This means that we absolutely must track our submitted articles to see where there were re-posted. And we should be doing the very same thing with any original or repurposed content that we publish or promote. This includes blogs and social media interaction on Digg, Delicious, Reddit, etc. Find a unique phrase in the article and set up a Google alert for it. When you receive a notification, check it out. If it’s legit, add it to your tracking documentation (You do have tracking documentation, right?).

Frank suggested that it might be better to create a new blog and/or micro-site and publish the content there. I think this is a great idea, but I don’t think it’s a replacement for article submission. If the value of article submissions is their syndication power, we would likely not be able to achieve the same reach with our own blog or micro-site (unless it’s been around for a while). But if you have the time to publish to both, you could take advantage of the power of an article submission site while simultaneously building up the PR/value of our own site.

Thoughts?

-Drew

Tags: article submissions sites, micro blogs, micro sites