Uhm, I need some advise. I read about this somewhere, that articles can effectively promote my website. Is this worth spending time on? I kinda need opinions from anybody who had experiences on submitting in article directories and how it affected their site. Thanks.

It does, but you have to keep in mind that's it only contribute to search engine ranking in the long term. Don't expect superb result any time soon.

The serious drawback is having to submit to hundreds upon hundreds to articles sites manually. If you choose to submit to only a few, that's up to you.

Another concern is when the same article appears on too many different places, we can't be sure it won't be penalized by search engines.

How high is the risk of being penalized? Glad I only started submitting on 10'ish directories.. So articles are a no-no now? Guess I'm returning to web directories and link partners..

Don't mean to freak you out. I'd continue submitting articles if I were you.

I personally can't tell how serious is such penalty. SEO experts in the house might be able to shed some light.

So I'll still submit.. Planning 100+ article directories :cheesy:. I guess having same content on different directories won't penalize that much? (or would it..?)

I'm not sure "penalized" is the right word. Perhaps "ignored" is better. Google doesn't want duplicate content in its index, so it tries to figure out which site holds the original text.

You can see this clearly with the case of DMOZ. The DMOZ link directory (and Google's "powered by DMOZ" pages) do OK in the search results. However, the thousands & thousands of sites that mirror DMOZ basically don't even appear in search results. Same thing with Wikipedia. Articles on Wikipedia rank quite high in Google's search results. But the thousands of mirror sites don't appear at all.

Google will try to do this with your article. It will see that the same article appears on 20 sites, and it will decide upon a "victor" to retain PageRank. The other 19 sites will not rank well or at all for that article. Note that I don't believe the sites get hurt -- Google does not blacklist them or apply a negative score to the other pages on the sites. It simply ignores the duplicate page.

What this means is that, if you want a decent strategy that saves time, you'll probably only bother with the top, high-traffic article sites. Get that article into maybe the top 5, and hope you get high PageRank from one, and a bit of traffic from the others. There wouldn't be much reason to bother with a no-name article repository, because you don't want some low-PR site to be Google's "victor," thus relegating your article to bad search results. And you won't get traffic from those sites, anyway.

Articles work. But past a certain point, don't expect a lot of PageRank. So only submit to the best (which also has the nice side-benefit of saving you time chasing diminishing returns).

-Tony

I have written some articles and posted them. Then I realised I'm wasing my unique content and put it in the sites that are reprinting same articles again and again. I got few visits this way and waste some great articles.

Now, I just focus on posting in forums and building my own content. And I start have less respect for those article sites that just copy-paste articles from other similar places

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Submitting articles to various sites in your industry with your website address in the credits can definitely not only help your search engine ranking, but get you some targeted visitors, credibility, and contacts. A good article will also earn you respect in your field.

Writing quality articles is always a plus to your site, even if you dont submit them to article directories- and even if you do please remember to keep to the major ones and/or the ones related to your niche market.

Even if you dont submit them to article directories and just post them in your site, that is also a way to help you rank best in S.E.´s as it will provide your site with good content that is, above all, original