Some Misinformation About Article Submission

Just reading through some articles and blog posts, you may come across information, or more accurately, some misinformation about article submission and the duplicate content myth. Knowing the truth can save you a whole lot of time and expense, especially if you’re considering paying someone to write unique articles for you.

The first is, if you submit the same article to all the article directories, Google will discard all but one. They go on to say, you need to submit unique articles to each directory so you don’t lose out.

The truth is, Google doesn’t discard anything. When a piece of content shows up on a number of sites, Google considers it to be popular and adds weight to it based on how many sites it shows up on. Weight is also added when the content is on high PR and authority sites.

Here’s where this myth’s proponents get confused . . .

Google will show only one instance of an article in a search query for the keywords it targets, and usually on the highest ranked site it appears on. So if you submit your article, yes the same article, to places like EzineArticles and some lesser directories, chances are Google will show the one on EzineArticles.

However, and just as a side point, Google will list your article in a search query on a lesser ranked directory if that directory accepts and posts your article first, before EzineArticles or other big PR sites. Then, as the more authoritative directories accept and post, Google will change the listing in a search results to the better one.

But once a page is indexed, it remains indexed. And even though it may not show up in a search result, its still part of the over all popularity of the content and counts toward the weight of the document.

On the other hand, when an article gets submitted to only one directory it stands alone with no weight beyond the authority of the site its on.

For more information about this, grab the free report “Don’t Get Duped About Duplication.”

Another bit of misinformation, and this one effects all of us who use article marketing in our campaigns . . .

They say you should only submit to the highest ranking authority sites and leave the rest of the 800 or so article directories alone.

Now everyone knows what makes an authority site, right? Quality content. It’s how all the highest ranked article directories got to that position.

So if a PR 0 site were to get a ton of incoming quality articles, it wouldn’t be too long before they too got a higher page rank and started being seen as an authority site, providing they moderated that intake correctly.

And if more of these smaller article directories gained weight with the search engines, we’d all have more authority sites to submit to.

Thus by taking a little extra time to place your articles in some of these article directories, you’d be helping to build up the entire system.

The immediate upside for you would be that your articles would get moderated faster on these sites with less article intake, and so they’d begin showing up in search results quicker. The long range benefit would be we’d all have more quality, authority sites to submit to over time.

Article submission is a powerful marketing tool if its done right. But with all the misinformation about article submission out there, its no wonder article directories are having to reject a lot of their intake, and why many of them are stuck with low page rank. Article submission is something we could all benefit from if we put aside all the misinformation about it, and each of us took the initiative to build up the directories.