How Article Directories Can Hamper Your SEO Campaign

Article directories have played a key role in search engine optimization link building strategies for years. Directories are a place where various website owners and authors publish their content on different article submission sites. There are thousands of such directories including Goarticles, ArticleDashboard, Sooperarticles, EzineArticles and more. These directories are filled with thousands of articles related to each category.

Eight years ago, article directories used to be the holy grail of content marketing. Why? Because publishing articles in a directory quickly grows a site’s backlink profile. Unfortunately, article directories are no longer the holy grail. In fact, publishing content to these directories, even the famous ones, is not only pointless, but it can actually harm your SEO campaign. Here are some of the reasons why:

Most Article Directories are Repositories of Bad Content

Even if you write unique, compelling and highly engaging content, your articles will be placed on a site where high-quality content is the exception, rather than the norm. Just visit a few of the article directories out there. Some articles are good, but most of them are loaded with grammar and spelling errors. Others are nothing more than veiled advertisements for whatever site the publisher is promoting in the links, without actually giving you useful information. Due to this reason, search engines such as Google usually have a low opinion of article directories.

Duplicate Content is Detrimental

Every webmaster knows that posting duplicate content on their own site is detrimental to SEO. But so is posting the same content to numerous different websites with your links in them. Some are aware of this, and in an attempt to get around it, they use article spinning programs which introduce subtle variations within the text to make the content look unique.

This may have worked like a charm back in 2008, but it doesn’t anymore. Search engines now have advanced algorithms that can detect spun or nearly identical content. This can again hamper your SEO campaign as you may be penalized in rankings.

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Directories Give an Overall Bad User Experience

Due to the poor quality of articles posted, very few will actually be useful to a reader who’s looking for an answer to a question or to garner information on a particular topic of interest. For this reason, search engines give very little value to article directories. If you do a search now, your search results are very unlikely to find content from article directories on the first page, unless you are searching for an obscure or very specific keyword.

There are Better Places to Publish Your Content

Just because directories are almost dead when it comes to SEO, it does not mean content marketing is going downhill with it. Search engines still love high-quality, original and informative content. If you’re able to produce such content or have it done for you, do not waste your time by uploading it to the article directories. There are numerous places where your content will be useful and bring search engine optimization benefits as well as more traffic to your site.

Creating your own blog is one way of achieving these benefits as long as it’s regularly updated with fresh content that’s related to your niche. You can ideally take advantage of social media platforms to further promote your posts.

Becoming a guest blogger on another site is another excellent way of taking advantage of your content. This gives you an opportunity of getting high-quality backlinks to your website and even helps build authority in your niche. However, you need to be careful where you publish guest posts. Blogs that allow every Tom, Dick, and Harry to publish posts about anything they wish aren’t appreciated much by the search engines. Instead, build a rapport with other website owners that run a blog that’s related to your niche. While it might be hard to get your posts published on sites like CNET, The Verge and Forbes, if you network properly, you might land an opportunity to post on a site that has a good reputation and rank on the search results.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that content marketing by posting on article directories no longer works like it did before and can actually hamper your SEO campaign. However, there are other strategies that you can employ to improve your site’s ranking for your targeted keywords. If you’re not comfortable with the intricacies of running an SEO campaign yourself, it’s wise to think about hiring an SEO professional. If you’d like more info on working with an SEO professional, please read our writers’ thoughts here and here. And don’t forget to read our report on what marketers need to know about SEO in 2018.