Article directories offer authors a platform to be recognized on the world wide web through mutual exchange with publishers. Authors only have to deliver content by submitting their articles with an author byline and websites that require content (especially new websites) can copy & paste these articles on their websites as long as they keep the author byline at the footer.
Ever since SEO marketers found out that links on the byline were being placed on websites that require content, they’ve been exploiting this method to promote links. Many article directory moderators don’t really care about the relevance of the links on the author byline. So promoters will have something that looks like this: This article was written by <author’s name & link to their site>, who specializes in <subject> and also writes for <promotion link>.
A good number of well-known bloggers have used this method to promote their sites. Some bloggers’ submission count is in the thousands. Now imagine this: there are thousands upon thousands of webmasters that know about article directories. They know that they can just copy & paste content from these directories to their new sites. Webmasters use this method for internal SEO; they want to have keywords on their new site so that relevant ads show up if they use Google Adsense.
Plus, nobody likes a site without content. So this is a method used by many owners of blog networks. They register hundreds of domain names, turn them into blogs, paste content from article directories and then advertise these blogs. Their intention is to make a quick buck by telling webmasters that they will have hundreds of backlinks (each blog generating one dofollow backlink).
Unfortunately, this method is no longer encouraged after this year’s Google algorithm changes. Large blog networks have been penalized and many sites that were using them were also affected. It’s one thing, to have an URL on a hundred blogs on one network. It’s another thing to post 100 articles on an article directory and then have each article shared a hundred times or more. Not only are your links on blogs you never agreed to, but in many cases these blog network owners are difficult to reach or they ignore your emails so it will take time to have all your links removed from these blogs.
So you might want to re-think article directory submissions for SEO.
