Article Submission – Do they work at all ?

Back to basics now. Article submission might be one of those oldest methods webmasters still rely on for link building methods – unfortunately. But are they really working? Do they give you backlinks, and if at all they do, how much of that time and energy you spent actually get converted to “authority”? That would raise more questions than answers.

Well, just to make sure all of us on the same level of understanding, let’s see what article submission really is.

Article submission is the process where an article on a targeted category/topic with crafted text and embedded links is distributed to channels that distribute them.

That’s a very crude definition I know. Well, two things here.

1 – The Article    and   2 – Where is it submitted to

Ideally, and article should be unique, well written and original with meaningful, contextual links and references. (Now, that’s an article I haven’t seen at all anywhere on the channels.) And the channel which receives the article is ideally one that is again exclusive, and original (yea alright..).

Now, article submission can really work if the above two factors are as close to the ideal one. Original source and original channels. But today (at least in my exp) both of them are heavily skewed. There are no original articles. All of them are either copied, or written to serve many. Let’s not talk about the relevancy of links here, that’s a different chapter, book altogether. And the channels that distribute the content is so original that they take articles from everyone, copied/scraped whatever, all they want is a few chunk of text to fill in, to show AdSense ads. Now, that’s when the whole process goes junk. Lack of original articles, and lack of original channels.

How can article submission be done right?

Can it be done? Yea, why not?

First off, article submission has to be seen as a method to increase the reach and length of your “tentacles” and not as backlink source.
When it is seen only as a backlink source, it is quite natural that it gets spammed.

- Write lot of articles and make them unique.
Submit each to only one source, and not multiple sources.

This will ensure that the same article does not appear on multiple sites, and thus avoiding duplicate content. So, whatever you grab from it, remains unique.

- Rotate the anchor texts.
Don’t use the same keyword as anchor text, use your creativity and make different versions of it, include them on each article.

- Do no submit to automated sources.
Yea, they’ll promise you a thousand backlinks in a week, but I can guarantee that all of them would be scrap. Because, all the articles on all those sites would probably be the same as they all got it automated.

- Submit only to reliable sources.
Like websites, that’s been there for some time, and not super scrapers that sprout out yesterday.

- If at all you want it automated, limit the number of pubishing to bare minimum. At least, you’ll save al those scrap websites from linking to you.

So essentially, article submision works or not, they’ll collect some backlinks for sure. To make the best out of them, don’t automate things, handpick sites and channels and spent some time writing stuff. The more the merrier !