So a couple months ago I went on a frantic article submitting fest for one of my sites and now I’m looking back on the results of that adventure. As far as promoting my articles I did a good job getting them out there. Really pushed them to a ton of article sites and they were high quality articles that received a very high acceptance rate. However now that I’m looking at the benefits I’m shocked to find very little. Even Yahoo (which even tends to ignore nofollow tags) shows only about 9 unique links from sites that posted my articles. Might I also point out two of which were scraper sites.
At this point it got me wondering so I started searching for terms related to those articles that normally would result in my site being one of the only ones. On average 1,500+ results from article directories with MY ARTICLES. Even though I’m still on top for most, I’m wondering why I should even be competing with these guys? They are obviously not helping my site out by giving it a valid link with the article. Eitherway an assumption can be made from looking at the number of inbound links gained from submitting and the amount of competitors I just gained for my unique phrases. That assumption is that I am going to end up screaming “THESE FUCKERS ARE STEALING MY TRAFFIC!” Way to ruin the business people!
At this point I’m not going to recommend everyone quit writing articles and submitting them solely because there is too many people that would argue against me on that, and a few would probably even have quality data to prove I am wrong. However I can assure you that I am going to quit doing it myself.
Side Note: Just to clarify to the curious, I submitted about 12 articles.
Interesting Eli…
Everybody’s doing article submissions and it’s getting automated etc. I’m writing articles and submitting them to my other related sites, after I modify them somewhat. This way, it gives me quality information and gets me into different blog engines etc.
Article submissions may be good to get traffic from sites that people are currently on. IE… they’re on the site, they click on your link. You may not get picked up by search engines though.
Article submission is a whole bunch of duplicate content to the search engines, especially if it goes to hundreds of sites.
Don’t neglect the value of a plain non-hyperlinked URL somewhere in the article. If a human being actually reads your article and finds it interesting, she might copy/paste the text and look up your site.
But that doesn’t help your rankings and IBLs in the least.
just submit your artilces on digg, even if it doesnt make it on the front page, you will still get way more traffic from that then all those article sites.
I have been submitting to a few articles to Ezine Articles.com. In your author section there it tells you how many people have copied this article to their site and how many people have gone from this article to your website. I have written some article that have been put on a ton of websites that drove almost no traffic to my sites.
One of my articles converts almost half the readers to my website. This article has not been picked up by many websites–too strong of a push to my site. I now write my articles to send people to my site- and educate them–I have been using “Check out pictures and get more information” as the tag line to get them to my site.
From the article I submitted many months ago, there was hardly any traffic. You pointed out a strong perspective on the downside of article submission, you are introducing more competition!