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A few years ago article submissions were great. They helped many of my sites reach PR 3 - 5 in less than 3 months. It helped me avoid the sandbox and got my sites to where they needed to be to rank well for terms. Using article submissions was the best way to get one way links. However, times have changed and submissions are no longer a valid method and I’ll explain why.

Google is out to find who is the owner of the content, the one who first created it. The first mistake people were doing were adding their articles to other sites before adding it to their own. Though having the links in the bio was what we wanted. If they would of placed the article on their site first - they would of been recognized as the source. But if they didn’t do that, they would still get the PR from the backlinks. The downside to that is, Google will only rank one of the pages in the SERPs. So while only the original ranked (if it wasn’t your site) they would still get the PR from the site is was on. That was then. Google has since made some changes.

As time went on… Google started seeing mass copies of articles on hundreds of sites across the net, filling the SERP’s with repetitive content. So to correct this, Google made note of where the first copy showed up. That would be the original. Now any other copies or large portions of the article found by Google would be turned into supplemental pages.

Think about this.. if you look at any large article submissions site and you take a look at the homepage’s PR and then looked at the category pages you may or may not see any PR. However, once you reached an article page, you will see the article itself has no PR. The fact is… that page is supplemental. People who go to these sites to take the content to place on their site.. those pages as well will be supplemental.

The solution. It’s simple, but there is more work involved. You can’t just buy an article submission software program for this. You need to find sites that will only except exclusive articles. If you are a web developer, hit sites and blogs that talk about your topic and submit an article or post. That will give them content and you links and traffic. Traffic and links that seem natural. The research will take up most of your time. You can’t just submit one article to any sites. It has to be one article to one site, that is credible and not full of duplicated pages.

I have seen some sites such as Article University, that talk about charging people to post a quality piece of content on their site, so long as you don’t post the same content elsewhere. This will help them as much as you. If all their pages are supplemental, they can’t make money off of traffic and you can’t get traffic from them or link juice.

Conclusion. If you want one way bakclinks and are looking to use articles as a way of doing so, fine. But make sure the site isn’t full of supplemental pages. Sites like associated content is a good example. However you will always need to find new sites to submit your content to. Posting over and over on one site for PR will do little for your SEO efforts. Also be smart about the content you write. Make it informative, make it interesting and add your links inside the content. Works better for SEO and for the readers.

I hope I didn’t complicate this subject. Please leave your questions or comments below if I missed anything or you need clarification.