Article Submissions: The SEO Fallacy

Everyone loves to submit articles for SEO purposes. It's such a great, and easy, way of getting incoming links for your web site, provided you can write something intelligently about your product or field. And even if you can't write worth a lick, many article reprint sites will do you the gracious benefit of accepting your submission.

But as one would assume, this clutters up the web quite a bit. Duplicate content, 'scraped' content, not to mention content written for the sole purpose of increasing link popularity instead of human eyes, amounts to a problem for search engines trying to present their users with useful content. So what are search engines doing about this? Easy: they're discrediting the value of your articles.

Your articles are now being relegated to Google's dreaded "Supplemental Index." If you're not familiar with that term, it's basically a database within Google's larger database where it keeps all the web pages and files it collects on the Internet. The Supplemental Index is where old, irrelevant pages go to die. Rather than banish them completely from their index, Google keeps them on hand in case a user's search query doesn't bring up enough in the regular index.

Search engines also like fresh content. A lot. Why do you think blogs, forums, RSS, and social bookmarking are so popular these days? The active participation between users and web sites, whether it's RSS feeds, blog comments, or 'diggs', just having something happen with your content weeks, months and years after creating it is one way of letting the search engines know that it's a good resource.

Articles submitted through reprint sites with suspect names like ArticleMegaBlaster sit buried deep in web sites on pages with low PageRank values. Their content never changes and search engine spiders rarely crawl them. So you have a link on that page to your web site. Big deal. It's the same thing as getting linked to from a link exchange page that's 3 categories deep and isn't indexed by Google. It's worthless. And what's worse is that this does more harm than you might expect. Search engines have a memory; a very long memory. Just as it's difficult to get re-listed by a search engine once your site has been banned, it is difficult to tell a search engine than your content is in fact very valuable once it's been copied on hundreds of poor quality web sites.

Think of article submissions the same as a news story by the Associated Press. The day it's published it's a popular read, as many places like CNN and MSN pick it up. After that for a couple weeks people may search and want to reference some information contained in that news story. But as time goes on, the news gets stale and is buried deep in the archives of web sites that reprint AP news. Any searches for that topic a year from now will result in newer stories about it, not the old article. Chances are it isn't relevant anymore, unless the story covers a major event and presents unique information about it. The same goes for your article. It will only stay relevant if others continue to link to it or feature it on their site.

If you really have something of value to write about, consider submitting it as a press release. If you have a popular blog, just print it up there and wait for people to find it. If it's worth their time, they'll use it (hopefully along with a link to your site) and do the distribution for you. If you don't have a blog of your own but think your article is interesting, ask some popular bloggers in your field to feature it on their blogs. Another option is to find out if web resources or publications in your industry accept submissions. Some web sites look for guest authors to write on a weekly or monthly basis. While most won't pay you anything, they will feature your writing and give you free exposure.

If the purpose of submitting your articles is ultimately for SEO purposes, then you must realize that SEO is an ongoing task. Continue to write about your products or services and look for ways of getting temporary exposure from each article.