Article Submission Sites

The value of submitting articles to leading article submission sites has recently been brought into question following rumours of the devaluation of links within submitted articles by Google.

It is a well known fact that the search engines value contextual links (those within relevant content) more than links from low quality directories and other sources having little thematic relevance, but where do article submission sites fit into this equation? In reality, any free source of links is unlikely to offer much value in improving ranking in Google's organic search results. After all, links from article submission sites do not imply a real vote for the site and are more likely to be viewed as self-promotionary or (at worst) attempts to artificially manipulate and improve the ranking of a site for certain keywords. It is however unlikely that article submission in itself would trigger a Google penalty, unless many thousands of links with identical anchor text were added at the same time.

That said, high Page Rank article submission sites still have their place in referring traffic and a well written article with sufficient value added content, optimised for the right keywords, can still achieve good search engine visibility and even attract natural links if it has sufficient merit. The problem is that many articles are just thrown together with little or no upfront research to focus them on the target market and as such are likely to offer few benefits in terms of referral traffic or search engine promotion.

The benefits of researching the topic and keyword focus of an article before preparing it are significant. It should be considered that long tail keyword terms are more likely to give good results than more competitive terms in widespread use. In many cases the article submission site will allow you, as the author, control over the article title and the SEO benefits of this must not be underestimated. Choosing an attractive, relevant title with the most appropriate keywords can really help to improve page views of your article and click through referrals to your site.

Choosing the right article site is equally important as it must have sufficient authority and high Page Rank to assist in getting your article Google indexed. Article sites which orphan submitted articles by using a poor navigation system are to be avoided. When assessing the relative merits of article submission sites, start by taking a look at recently submitted articles to see if they get Google cached. Just enter the full URL into a Google search window and see if the pages included in the Google index.

When considering automated submission of the same article to multiple sites it's worth noting that many search engines have aggressive duplicate content filtering, so the same article posted elsewhere on the web is unlikely to be indexed more than once by major search engines. Hence, the benefit of automated submissiona will purely be based on any referral traffic generated from article click through. Low quality, low Page Rank article sites are unlikely to provide much referral traffic, so paying to submit the same article to hundreds or even thousands or article submission sites is unlikely to give much benefit.

An list of high PR free article submission sites will help you shortlist sites to target and those which are likely to provide the most promotional value.