If you’ve the basic knowledge about SEO, you probably might remember the days when posting articles on article directories was on rage. A quick article of 300 to 500 words with links at the bottom, published on several article directory sites was expected to bring significant amount of traffic to the site. But comfort zone soon fell out when link penalties and duplicate content fillers were used by webmasters to disregard the article directories. This being said there are still many article directories active that allow publishing of same articles at different sites. The penalty of this can be damaging to the parent site. However some of the article directory sites have employed editors in their panel to check the quality of articles before publishing them.
How does Google keep an eye on article directories? Matt Cutt’s video on rise of article directories has information about the genesis of popular sites such as Ezine, Articlebase, and Ehow. The video explains how article directories have lost their decent sense over the years. The article directory sites make money by advertising the articles posted by writers. The writers in turn expect traffic to come to their site. If someone finds a particular piece of writing useful they might post it on their webpage. This might give some more clicks to the original writer. However, recently the content on the article directory tends to be of low quality. In fact, in many cases spam content is syndicated over the internet. Article directories today are simply posting the articles to different sites and are hoping to get them downloaded and used on other websites. This might not turn effective in all cases.
SEO companies who stay updated on new search engine habits have already abandoned the use of article directories. However, there are some webmasters who still see the opportunity of getting traffic from the directories. Today the reality is that many of the article directories have stolen low quality content that some of us don’t realize.
Matt Cutts in his video also gave some hints that search algorithm has filtering methods to detect the spam on mass article directories. Perhaps there could also be penalization on the parent site. Personally Matt Cutts suggests to not upload poor quality article on the site taken from article directories.
For years now several SEO practitioners have not relied on article directories. The most useful thing a webmaster can do is take topic ideas from article directory sites and rewrite them. There is no advantage in ranking after submitting the same article.
You may be asking yourself, “Do I have to stop posting articles on directory sites?” No, find the article directories having high Alexa ranking and post your articles there. Also keep the quality good so that users get interested to click on the links provided in the article. To make the link effective, keep the landing page to the subscriber’s form. This will let you build mailing list at no cost. In the resource box along with the URL also include author’s bio having brief detail about yourself.