Interesting timing for me to discover this post, I am in the middle of writing an article that has a working title of "Just Say No To Article Directories", and I just had a discussion with an associate who was wondering if they
"should spend $250 to have 5 articles written and have them submitted to the top 60 article directories".
Here is a few things that I like to keep in mind when it comes to developing inbound links.
1.) Google does an amazing job filtering duplicate content from their SERPS (search engine results pages). They do not need 60 copies of the same article so they will filter out 59 of them. At best, they will give you receive the backlink credit for only one articles.
2.) Google has alarm bells that go off when all of the sudden a website has 300 inbound links.
3.) Google likes to see
varied anchor text in the articles. I would assume these articles are being submitted using one of the many "article submission" software products and that all each of the 60 articles will all be identical, including your anchor text, which is a BAD thing.
4.) Google, has more than likely discounted all of these top article directories, and are not providing any backlink credit.
5.) Google is amazingly smart and does a tremendous job at protecting their search results from these types of strategies.
Another thing to take note of as well, -- is that inbound linking these days is NOT at all about quantity, but rather about
quality.
Personally, if I had set a budget of $250 for the purpose of developing Backlinks and traffic, I would hire a writer, and have them develop ten 600-800 word quality articles at $25 a piece. I would carefully embed three carefully thought links back to my site in each article, then I would approach other webmasters with search engine
trusted websites and offer each one, one article.
By the time I was done, I would have 10 great articles, each with 3 nice text links pointing back to three pages on my site, located on 10 different websites.
I
guarantee these 30 backlinks (10 articles each with three inbound links) would far
outperform the other 300 backlinks.
It is a little more work of course, but services like the one mentioned about, is one of the reasons so many webmasters are spending money on backlink development, but are not seeing the results in the search results.
If I was to submit to article directories, and I do, I
carefully hand pick them (good PageRank, ranks well, has traffic that I can inherit - I.e.
Ezine Article Submission - Submit Your Best Quality Original Articles For Massive Exposure, Ezine Publishers Get 25 Free Article Reprints, and then I only submit one unique article to that article directory and no where else. I then make sure that article has at least one inbound link to it from somewhere else on the Net!
As for paying $25 to submit an article to a directory. If it's quality, and they offer me the ability to have three text links in that article, it is probably a great place to submit an article. (for the backlinking alone, not too mention the traffic you might inherit)
The biggest concern I would have with
mass submitting articles to article directories, because it's easy, and everybody seems to be doing it, the search engines will
neutralize its effectiveness in the same way they did to "linking partnering" when that got out of hand.
James
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