Once upon a time it was prudent to advise marketers to send their articles to the major article directories. However, this is now and now is different. A lot different. First of all, major article directories such as Ezinearticles can be really particular about the approval process for the content. It is easy to spend too much time trying to get an article approved. The process is even slower for free members. But hey, who is going to pay to send one article to one site in order to get it approved more quickly? Duh?
Then comes the issue of backlinks. When you submit your articles to Ezinearticles (EZA) you get backlinks from only one IP address. So after a while the backlinks are less effective than the first ones were. It is also evident that EZA has different policies in place for different level members relative to hyperlinks in resource boxes. That seems unfair to me and it creates a lot of aggravation for my students just learning to use their service.
When WordPress became the default content management system and publishing platform for new sites, there was also a lot of ways this “new” technology could be used to syndicate articles easily. With WordPress you can create a user account with the ability to only publish articles. With that user account in hand you now have the ability to receive free articles and publish them on your site if you want.
If you’re going to be receiving free articles there has to be people writing the articles you’ll be receiving and that’s where services like My Article Network come into play. These services allow you a lot of freedom with your article syndication and some even allow you to put your affiliate links in the articles. With this type of freedom you can write good articles and make money whenever anyone reads them and buys a product via your affiliate link embedded in the article.
Not only does “EZA” (and other article directories) prohibit placing your affiliate links directly in your articles, they are not especially helpful with syndication. Many authors who have had their articles republished discover that the links have been left out. But since no one is monitoring that, you are the one who must become involved it you want to correct the situation. That is a time consuming hassle.
It does seem that the major article directories are dying a slow death. Why? Because they are not much help when it comes to syndication and that means they are not keeping up with the times. When companies like this do not keep up with the needs of their users they experience a loss of trust and value and over time are less desirable to use. However, since these major article directories have been around so long and their content approval procedures are so strict, they do really well in the search engines and they get your articles ranked well still.
With article syndication allows you to obtain backlinks from hundred or thousands of IP addresses, not just a single site. Some article syndication services like isnare are a bit less effective, since what they do is post duplicate content to a many places. Posting duplicate content to many places simultaneously can get those links discredited. Often, due to the sheer volume of duplicate content only a few of your content articles will be indexed and a minority of those links will actually be applied to your sites.
In order to obtain useful backlinks you must have different sites link to you and they must be quality sites. Services such as Linkvana can give you hundreds of good backlinks. It does not require long articles or a long wait for the article approval. The scene is changing dramatically regarding backlinks. My guess is that it wont be too long before the major directories start to play a lesser role.
