A minute ago I was asked in a PM why I do not recommend article submission as an SEO tactic.
First off, article submission may be useful, not for SEO, but for website promotion, if those articles are submitted to high traffic sites that actually drive traffic.
However, most article submission services and article submission directories are simply spamfests. They accept any odd rubbish, and then websites owners, hundreds of them, place those rubbish articles on their rubbish sites in an lame attempt to pick up "
long tail" keyword searches.
However, some article submission does drive traffic. For example, submit a high quality article to SEOToday and it might drive some traffic. But then, the selectivity is there, and 99% of rubbish submitted will get rejected. That makes a huge difference.
The other you have to ask is, if you have a high quality article, why give away that content for free? You should think about putting it on your own site and reap the benefits - links and traffic.
Now, on to uniqueness and the supplemental index. First:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by John Scott
A lot of folks think that Supplemental Index is a bad thing because pages relegated to the supplemental index do not drive traffic.
I believe the supplemental index is almost wholly pages with non-unique text, and Google’s motivation for creating another index for that has more to do with filtering (devaluing) links from those pages than it is with keeping those pages out of their search results pages.
Google’s algorithm is still 95% link based. When you are a search engine that is driven by links and manipulated by links, it is in your interest to restrict link weight distribution authority. Google has smartly done this by devaluing link weight from non-unique pages (read: supplemental index); I am guessing that they also devalue non-unique links.
So, for those who need it spelled out, automated linking is out. Unique links count more. Unique anchor texts, unique contexts on pages with entirely unique text.
Non-unique = bad, very bad.
Unique = good, very good.
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Source: Internet Marketing Blog.com
Google is going after duplicate content, and placing it in their supplemental index, in order to diminish / block the passing of link juice from spammy duplicate content.
Duplicate content, such as article submission spam and automated web directory submissions (
which use the same description & title for hundreds of directories), has been used for years by SEO's and these are the same SEO's who are now complaining about lost rankings.
Supplemental index = duplicate content = no link juice.
Article submission for SEO is just another form of spam. Google knows it, and has reacted.