Hi. A while ago I added in regular article writing as part of my SEO campaigns. Now I have done this for a bit and was trying to take account of how well it succeed.

I have had little to no success.

This may be for a number of reasons. The most obvious ones being my article may be really rubbish and no one in their right mind would want them on their site. So what I was hoping to find out is how well everyone else is doing with this apporach of generating traffic/links. And maybe some advice on how to be more successful at this.

The things is I am not to convinced that this would ever work that well, as far as I see their are tons of people producing these article and very few people looking for content.

Persently I am not looking for advice on writing article themself more on how people go about distrubuting them effectively. Persently I use WillC new http://www.articlesender.com/.

Do people find that it takes a long time? Does the effect of a good article hang around for years? Does anyone get their article listed in the really large well use newsources, i.e. BBC, Yahoo news so on...

I've had very limited success with a previous submission, (on goarticles). Recieved 2 placements that showed up in MSN, 1 showed up in Yahoo, and neither in Google. I've just tried the new service myself, we'll see how that goes. I think in the forum over there, there is someone tracking and reporting his success or failure publicly

yes heis. I have even welcomed that as I know the value of our service.

well I have been doing this for a bit too. I do not know if I have any concrete results, but to address a couple of things...

you mention the time it takes. Well I write articles and such that I use in my normal day for training our sales people, or things written as "tips" for our clients. THings I would normally need to write anyway. I then publish these articles.

Second. I do use google alerts to tell me when they are found somewhere.

Last I would disagree that there are not many people looking for content. First of all, I use a lot of these articles. Not any of the 200 word junk articles, but good ones.

Remember that for all these people that hear writing articles will help your SEO, there are others that heard that fresh content will help your SEO - so these people are all looking for articles written by the first group.

Now my last bit of advice is to choose carefully what you are going to write about. Articles all take about the same time to write weather they are published a lot or not. So what I found is to write for article categories that are not as popular. Take goarticles.com - I wrote an article for real estate and one for html.

If more articles are submitted to a topic, yours is burried faster.

with the real estate one, it is in a popular category and was not published at all according to my google alerts and my article was on the second page after one day. My second in HTML which is not a popular topic is still on the first page after a month and will probably be there another 3 or 4 months. It has already been published several times.

Now again - I have no evidence weather this actually helps my SEO, but just writing articles gives me noticably more credibility with my clients.

I'm more of a write articles for our own site kind of guy.. I understand the desire to have the articles used as links/traffic generators to our sites, but I just can't bring myself to give up some of the very difficult to write and edit articles that I have written over the last year.. Especially the how it's done articles.. It's just too unique of content to let it out into the wild..

I may release a few later, but I'm not sure that I'm convinced that creating all the similar content vs unique content is worth the link it sometimes generates.. And then there are the guys that just take your articles and don't provide the links or strip your info..

They do that anyway. It's a losing battle.

True, but if you only put your articles on your site then they become easier to hunt and kill, I mean get them taken down instead fo trying to keep track of the ones that are doing it right..

Fresh content is definately a good thing, but surely the chances of this getting flagged as duplicate content is really high.

That's my opinion on the subject.. I've seen the same article on so many sites that I rarely read them any more.. But then I'm old and rememebr the dark days when you couldn't find anything on the net.. Now you can find multiples of everything, and most of it's usually wrong :p

I actually posted an article serp in google on the webpro world in answer to greeneagles stupidity the other day that was on webproworld as well as about 100 other sites, and was ranking decently on most all of them for phrases in it. So obviously google is not currently flagging articles as dupes in the standard algo. Now when they do a major dupe filter run across the index, that I do not know.

Got a link for the article?? I'd like to read it..

Its in that 23 page thread you were a part of

Oh, thanks, I developed a nervous tick every time I looked at the thread and eventually I went partially blind from the trauma.. I wonder if I'm recovered enough to go back..

Steve

hahahahaha

i have made a conscious decision to stop submitting articles for fear of the duplicate penalty effect.

Lets talk about the dupe content effect a bit as I think you may misunderstand exactly what happens.

If a duplicate penalty is placed, it is on the article on whatever site it sits on. The article simply would not pass value at all or be able to rank for any keywords. It would not follow back to your site and cause your website any harm at all. The dupe issue lies strictly on the page on another site that is seen as dupe content.

People have been getting articles published all over the place since the internet started and it has never hurt them at all.

Too many damn misconceptions running around.

I'm with William on this one.. As long as Google can figure out the source of the file I don't see the duplicate penalty doing any harm, it just doesn't do much good.. Which leads to the next guess of, if they can determine that it's a dupe, can they or would they, depricate the on page link bak to the source?? Or would those links stay in place as an indication that the source site is an authority site since so many people are carrying that article

Personally, I love my content too much to share it

I see black helicopters everywhere

which begs the question, how would google know that which site has the duplicate content? what if google determine that my site was the one which plagiarised from the site to which i submitted the article?

Most people nowadays write articles for their site, then they write unique ones to distribute to get traffic from what i am seeing from running articlesender.

I've been experimenting with articles for a while, not long enough to note any SEO benefit. But would have to say Christmas came early this year when I awoke yesterday to find one of my articles had been used on WebProNews called "The SEO Snowball Effect".

I submitted the article via Articlesender and manualy to a number of other sites. Viewing our stats shows around 180 people have clicked on the bio box links and two people requested SEO work just from reading the article.

I must admit it was very nice to wake up that morning and see something I wrote was considered to be good enough to publish on a site that I consider to be one of the best in the industry.

I guess being associated with a well known site like WebProNews adds authority. So even if the SEO benefit is little, I will carry on distributing articles purely for recognition and traffic.

Glad we could help you.

We get so many emails from people asking why nobody picked up their article. The first thing I always ask is for the article title or ID so I can look at the article, because 90% of the time the article is not really an article at all, more of a pure advertisement. Some people do not get that publishers simply do not want spam disguised as an article, they want real articles. Some people really need to realize this.

We can only distribute the article to publishers, it is up to them if they want to toss it away with the trash or use it. The better the article, the more chance at exposure.

The service is run the best it can be and we are always adding to it, and improving it. Distribution is already almost 100% better than it was when we first launched the site, and it is not stopping there either. In the next week watch for over 100 article dashboard run sites to be added.

I forgot to say thanks in that post, anyway seems like a good excuse to make my 50th post. Thanks for a great service and getting me published on WebProNews

Would have to agree with the high number of spammy articles you find on distribution sites. I've read people saying they write an article in 30 mintutes but how good an article is it going to be.

Some of my more successful articles that have been published have taken up to six months of research and quite a few hours to write. I often write an article and spend at least an hour rewriting it until I'm happy with it.

Still it makes me laugh when you read some of things people think are articles.

Can't wait to see whats coming next on ArticleSender Will.

Then you should leave it, and come back to it the next day. It's amazing how many times an article needs corrections that simply aren't seen when they are written.

Good point Phil.

Just been reading a post on Matts Cutts blog where he said links from Prweb do not pass PR. Somone asked if article sites where treated the same and Matt replied:

"If someone is just syndicating articles from ezine or articlecity or wherever, that’s not adding a lot of value in my book".

Not sure whether that means the article's links give no weight at all or just sites reproducing the article carry no weight. Or it could mean nothing and simply be his view.

If the site is relevant to the article and to your website and has good PR. It should be a valuable link. The question remains: "How long will they keep that article in their archive"?