1. Articles Directory: is it worth sending content?

Yes it is, and more than ever! Article directories were a problem when Google started to clamp down on them, but now the bad ones have been removed from the Google search engine results pages. Even the good ones have had to tighten up their act.

2. Define an article directory.

An article directory is a website that has a lot of articles on it. It is an article site that also has a lot of links coming from it for other domains. This is a troubling definition because Wikipedia stands up to the same description and yet it is not commonly called an article directory.

An article directory is going to have articles on it with lots of different titles. The articles on it may be wide ranging in topic or may be around similar topics. There are also a lot of these article directories that allow other people to post their articles on there. This is the most common format for an article directory. They often have some sort of checking and authentication procedure, but most article directories are not too fussy (they just don’t want Black-hat SEO stuff or plagiarized stuff).

3. Why did they use to be a bad thing?

They used to be a bad thing because backlinks used to be a very big deal with SEO but they are now not so important. Back in the days when they were important, there were a lot of sites filled with flimsy and poor quality content. They were filled with content just so that people could add links to them and post the links to their website for an SEO boost.

Nowadays the Google algorithm is modern enough to exclude article directories that are full of poor quality content. This has meant that the article farms and poor quality content mills are no longer on the Google search engine results pages. The article directories that are usable and are not part of black-hat SEO are the ones that remain. They are not the bad ones as the bad ones are not listed on the Google search engine results pages. By not listing them, Google has made them useless when it comes to SEO so people do not bother to link from them.

4. An example of an article directory that tightened up its act

 There is an article directory called Bukisa that were dropped from the Google search engine results pages, so they had to clean up their act a little more. This included things such as stopping their affiliate advertising money sharing scheme.

 5. Are they a good thing now?

 They certainly are because they are able to offer you backlinks that are relevant and strong. The strength of a backlinks may be increased if the content of the page is relevant to the pages it links to, and you are able to add the content yourself so it puts you in charge.

 6. Is there less competition?

 This is a tricky subject, as there are millions of websites that have links coming from article directories (both the paid and unpaid kind). But, at the moment more people are concentrating on either blog posts or building their own article sites to get more backlinks, so technically there is less competition than there was two years ago.

Why Go For An Article Directory?

 7. Getting approved quicker

 It takes a long time to get some snot-nosed blogger to accept you working for free to further his/her blog, which is basically what guest blogging is. However, there are lots of article directories that allow you to load up articles right away, and there are the ones that have a very quick approval time.

 8. Getting onto an important website

 An article website may not seem very important, but you can bet your kiddies’ college fund that most of them are more popular than your average blog. If you were to count website (domain) visitors alone, then most article directories get more visitors than a single blog.

 9. Creating a well rounded backlink profile

A well rounded backlink profile means getting backlinks from a number of different places and different types of domain. Having backlinks from article directories is just a part of that.

 10. Getting traffic from more than just blogs

 Lots of web masters are getting most of their links from blog and the guest blogs that they have posted to because blogs are hot at the moment. You can rise above them by having backlinks from article websites/directories too. More content on more domains means more coverage/exposure, and don’t forget that people check websites for information, they don’t check blogs.

 This is a Guest Post By Kate Funk.

Kate Funk writes on behalf of Aussiewriter.com. She is proficient in writing on everything connected with networking and blog writing.