Distributing Your Articles Effectively

One of the more popular ways to promote your site and build links for search engine optimization is through the publication of articles. This used to be a fairly simple game, but has changed significantly in the last 12 months.

Let’s start from the very beginning. Publishing articles is a tremendous way to produce traffic to your site. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, the distributions sites you will use are receiving heavy traffic and people that read your articles will often click through to your site. Second, the articles can really help the link count for your site. Since rankings on Google, Yahoo and MSN are at least partially determined by the number of relevant sites linking to you, the use of your articles by other sites is a boon.

Once people figured out the value of articles for improving rankings, the mad rush was on. Article distribution sites started appearing everywhere. Services to help you submit you articles to the thousands of directories also started popping up. Next came writing services that would prepare the articles for you. While all of this was helpful, it ruined the game to some extent. Why? The search engines started taking notice and tweaked their ranking systems.

The beauty of publishing articles to add to your sites link count was that one article could produce a ton of links. A good, timely article in your niche could easily produce 500 inbound links to your site as other people republished your article. It could easily take a year to gain the same number of links by manually trading with other sites. Alas, the search engines deemed this a bit unfair, particularly Google.

Google instituted a duplicate content filter to address the article link advantage. This filter essentially gathers all the links to your site and eliminates the links derived from content that is the same. Put in simple terms, an article that is republished 500 times by other sites now only counts as one new link. It can take Google a week or so to filter out the additional links, but it will get there.

So, what can we gain from any of this when trying to promote our sites with articles? Well, it is important to understand that not all is lost. In fact, we are going to benefit from refocusing our efforts on a more efficient approach.

We are going to narrow down the distributions sites we submit to and focus on those only. Since we don’t get credit for duplicates of our articles, there is no reason to submit them to hundreds of sites. Instead, we need only pick the ones where they get the most exposure. You may have your favorite, but I suggest going with EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com. Both of these sites have been around forever and have a large readership. You can expect your article to both be read by many people visiting the site and republished as well.

Obviously, the duplicate content filter being used by Google has neutered article publishing to a certain extent. You can still take advantage of it, however, if you understand how to focus on certain sites and use your time efficiently.

Halstatt Pires

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