Do Article Links Provide You With Any Value?

To most people, article marketing means writing an article and submitting it to numerous article directories with a few links back to your own site and individual pages. There are literally thousands, such article directories to submit to. Some aggressive promoters tout software that automatically submits your articles to these directories in bulk. There's even software available to automatically generate your articles for you and their sales pages scream promises of reaping thousands of incoming links at the push of a button.

It's always tempting to go for the quick-fix, and Internet marketers make some good money promising webmasters automated ways to rocket their sites to the top of the search results. However, low-quality links are the links from article directories and are not real important. Blasting out articles to hundreds of article directories using automated software is typically going to result in lot of low-value, low-quality links.

Duplicate content penalyt: If you're submitting the same article to several directories, you'll be creating duplicate copies of the same content in various places around the web. Most of the articles will get filtered out as duplicate content, and the links on them will be worthless. Search engines know that one of the primary uses of article directories is to provide an easy way for SEOs to boost their site's link count.

Getting a couple of article directory links is fine, but if they start consisting too large a part of your overall links you risk making it look like you're trying too hard to pump up your incoming links. You're painting a big red target on your site telling the search engines you're a known link manipulator.