One of the most important aspects of SEO is developing a decent stream of incoming links. This means having to find a variety of sources prepared to host a link to you as well as relying on natural links to build as a result of your site’s content.
You can spend hours trying to find a decent directory or emailing countless people in the vain hope of securing a link. So why not speed it all up a bit? Write one decent article, submit it to a range of decent directories and have it syndicated to sites across the Internet. Bingo, you’ve got dozens of links in a very short period of time.
But if only life were so simple. The theory is great, the practice though can be a little different. So let’s have a look at a few of the pros and cons of this SEO technique that polarises many in the industry.
First up, the pros:
Links, links, links – It’s an obvious one, but every link has the ability to add good strength to your site. So by submitting your article to dozens of sites and including an embedded link in each one, invariably you will earn links as a consequence.
As already mentioned, you’ll get even more links when other people choose to republish the article on their own sites. So you can even end up in the hundreds if you are particularly successful.
It’s free – Unless you use special syndication software, it shouldn’t cost you a penny to submit an article. Even top sites like Ezine Articles won’t charge for the privilege of hosting your content.
It’s easy – Just write an article, sign in and publish – nothing too complicated about that.
Now though, the cons:
Duplicate content issues – the more astute of you will probably have noticed a reasonable flaw in all of this. If your content is exactly the same and plastered across numerous different sites, surely that will trip a duplicate content penalty from Google. Well, most probably, yes.
It isn’t always easy to measure, but if you are just going to focus solely on distributing one article to hundreds of sites, it is likely that you will only really get long-term benefits from a handful. The links aren’t worthless, but they aren’t likely to propel you to the top any time soon either.
Measuring success – The issue of how exactly to measure the success of an article has plagued the industry for some time now. A unique article title will certainly help; this way you can just put that in quotations and see what the search engines throw back. But then of course determining the strength of links and traffic can be difficult to gauge.
Spam by any other name… – These mass produced articles are everywhere, and whilst the measurability of effectiveness is still challenged, much of the regurgitated content is clogging the Internet. Some see it as entirely unproductive, unless of course you have something new and interesting to say. In the most part though, it is usually content not good enough to put on your own blog – so what does that say?
For what it’s worth, if you are struggling to get links, weak or otherwise, then article marketing is a great way to add some instantly. They won’t necessarily be the best referrals, but they will at least start building your profile.
If you’re smart about where you submit to and how you choose to promote your articles, there are benefits to be had. But when you just dump them wherever will take them without any real thought, you could just be doing extra work without any of the benefit.
So it’s not worth discounting entirely, but you should certainly be looking to attach article marketing to a more sustainable link building programme built on relevance, variety and strength.
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