An article service which also offers an article submission service recently promoted a wonderful way to make sure that your website business slides down the search engine results, and possibly becomes blacklisted completely. The article submissions service in question advised creating one article for your online business, and then submitting it at the same time to three hundred article directories.
This kind of advice angers me, as there are many established companies on the web run by ordinary people such as you and me, who are attempting to raise a decent living. It is people such as those advertising mass submission of articles that could very rapidly wipe your organisation off the web entirely. I don't know why they do it - either they don't grasp the concept of search engines, or they simply want a headline grabbing tagline that will raise them a quick and easy few dollars.
Either way - they care very little for your website. Failing to grasp the concept of search engines, article directories and duplication of content is not a great start for an article submission service! But for the unwary online business owner, seeing a organisation that will compose a single article and send it hundreds of times for you might appear good - hundreds of backlinks almost straight away, what could be simpler?
Unsurprisingly, it can't work this way. Submitting your search engine optimized articles to hundreds of article directories will only cause hundreds of duplicated articles clogging up the net. Search engines take a very negative view of duplicate content, and will do one of two possible things. If you're fortunate they will simply notice the first version of your article and ignore every subsequent copy, or if you're not so fortunate, your full website will be blacklisted for article spamming. Either way, you've just lost out.
The trouble is that article submission sites are frequently just wanting to be paid an additional amount for doing precious little work. One, well written, keyphrase optimized article might well cost you somewhere in the region of $15. Granted, there are cheap sites online that write articles for very few dollars, but have you actually attempted reading them? And how many ever get to the top of the search results pages? It goes without saying, you get what you pay for. But many of these submission services then charge $50-100 to publish your single article to hundreds of sites.
On the other hand won't that take them ages to carry out? No - it certainly won't. There are numerous of automatic article submitter software products on the net. All they do is compose one article, then transfer it into their package and press send. The full job is achieved in ten minutes - and you've just lost a large sum of money and have put your website at terrible risk, with no possible likelihood of return.
So what should you be doing instead? The answer is easy - remember that there are never any rapid solutions that last, no cheap solutions worth the cash and no lazy means round a challenge which actually solve it. Rather than having a solitary mediocre article created and then spammed across the article directories, have a dozen articles written, and send each to just a very select few directories. In this way you don't run the risk of duplication of content, don't run the risk of being blacklisted for spamming, and end up with a effective number of extremely good backlinks, which will do much more good for your website business.
Remember - an article submission service that you can use confidently is one which will be able to combine an article writing service of high quality with a submission policy which does not place your business at risk. As an article writer myself I have been approached by organisations who have offered hundreds of dollars to create and submit duplicated articles, but I have always said no, offering advice that will save their business. Make sure that you are aware of this possible danger, and safeguard your business.