The best article submission sites put to the test
Submitting your blog posts to article archiving sites is widely recognized as not only a good way to build credible links to your website, but also a means of getting more people to read your prose. In January of this year I started submitting to major article directories. I will save you a lot of pain and suffering by telling you what I have learned from each of you during this process. They are listed below in order of popularity.
As: With over 20 million unique visitors a month, this is one of the best sites in the world. I enthusiastically joined, but have not been able to post any articles because apparently there is a bug in their system. On the other hand, more than a hundred users asked to become my “friend” in the first days after registering, although we don’t know each other from Adam! I still can’t figure out what advantage they get from adding friends, but it’s probably because you can spam them! I should point out that you won’t be able to post your article as-is on Ehow, since its format requires you to enter step-by-step instructions on how to do something. You can adapt much of your material, of course, but it’s a lengthy process that can end in frustration if the aforementioned bug rears its head. So far, my participation in eHow has not generated tangible benefits!
EzineArticles: The precursor of all article archives! His readership is still in the millions, and putting your articles here will give you quality backlinks overnight. The main difference between EzineArticles and the competition is that your articles will always be reviewed before being published. Your accepted submissions will be syndicated by default.
Related content: A very well-regarded credible file, with the most polished look. At first, humans review your submissions and take a long time to do so, but after a few are accepted, inclusion is immediate. My first article was rejected for plagiarism, citing my own duplicate article that I had published on EzineArticles! I eventually asked them to fix their bug, but while it’s still in test mode, I recommend that you submit associated content first, and once it’s approved, submit the rest to avoid any issues. Associated Content’s RSS feeds are picked up by some of the major news sites, including USA Today.
calamardo: Despite being part of a site that has millions of visitors, my Squidoo content took longer to be crawled by Google, and some of it was altered. Squidoo, while often referred to as an article site, is actually a kind of social network. You sign up and create unlimited “lenses”, which are pages where you place any number of elements through a wide variety of widgets. The only widget that works for our purposes here is the RSS widget that you can use to display your posts, but since it’s dynamic content, it won’t generate many backlinks. The number of people who read my lenses in two months is in the single digits, probably because there are several million lenses to compete with. Unless it’s for the backlinks you can place through some of the widgets, I can’t recommend you waste your time with Squidoo.
zimbio: This is one of the easiest to work with. You add your RSS feeds through your member interface and then simply choose which posts you want to include. You are only asked to select an appropriate category and your content will immediately appear online. You have the option to edit the download text, which might be a good idea to avoid having duplicate content (see bottom of this article). In order to load the full text of the article, make sure your RSS feed is not set to only use an excerpt. Despite its limitations, Zimbio should not be ignored as it has millions of monthly readers.
search warp: It’s quite dated looking, with ugly and colorful icons and logos, but don’t let that stop you from becoming an active member, as this is a credible site and articles you submit here will be quickly crawled by major search engines . . Initially, all your uploads will be reviewed by Searchwarp staff, but they usually give you a quick approval unless it’s a weekend or holiday. Searchwarp bills itself as a community of writers, and for the privilege of posting, you are expected to participate in a number of ways, all of which will add to your “Community Engagement Score”. You need three points to submit a new article. The primary activity for collecting points is reviewing other members’ articles and rating them for a variety of criteria. Posting a comment gets you more points, but learn from my mistakes by not criticizing even the worst articles, as that will lead to threats of retaliation and insults, just like I did. If you absolutely must let the author know how much you suck, please use the anonymous comment option! After a series of submissions, your articles will be automatically approved. Searchwarp allows site visitors to copy your articles and place them on their own sites, if you enable that option per article. Searchwarp is like a social network for hobbyist writers and therefore requires the most time to participate.
GoArticles: You have only a fraction of the visitors of Ezinearticles, but your backlinks were tracked overnight. Unlike the other top article sites, this one never subjects its uploads to any scrutiny by its staff. It also makes money from content contributors by charging for preferred positioning.
An important point: if you are going to participate in any of these sites, it is that duplicating the content of your own site in this way will have consequences with Google. Contrary to popular belief, Google will not penalize your site’s page rank, but instead will seek to not include duplicate content in search results, likely resulting in the version of your site being skipped in favor of one of the top ranked article archives. The solution is to produce two versions of each article: one to appear only on your site and one to syndicate. Each version should differ significantly from the other, although it need not be a total rewrite.
Another thing to keep in mind is that if your material is republished by other sites, they will rarely honor the terms of the article site’s syndication agreement. Even if they keep their bio, I have often found my articles with different titles and extra paragraphs added. Content theft is of epidemic proportions on the web, and all of these article archives have a disclaimer absolving them of any liability. It is up to you to find and contact any offenders. One way to locate violations is to search for exact phrases in your article.
For all of these sites, the number of page views to their articles will likely be quite low, and the clicks back to their websites via the links in their bio will be even fewer. Several offer monetary rewards based on the number of page views your posts get, but it will only be a pittance even if you end up being a top author. Post to article archives for the quality backlinks they generate and for the pleasure of having others read your words!