Using others Articles - Should I link out or host it?

[allreal]

OK so I am putting together a relevant articles pages as I said before.

To get enough content I will be either 1. using a free article provider such as http://www.amazines.com/free_web_content.cfm and posting relevant articles directly on my site or 2. finding real good quality articles and linking directly to the authors page.

Does anyone have any opinions on the best route to take?

Also, if I host my own original articles on the site too, should I post them in article directories or should I keep them to myself?

Thanks all!

[Trent Brownrigg]

I say host them on your site that way you are creating more pages of content for yourself as well as helping out the author of the article.

And when you write your own you can submit them as well. Just be sure to have them on your site for a while before you start submitting.

[Dustin07]

I did a lot of article submitting when I first learned what SEO was. I did it mostly for the backlinks. But over the last 6 months I've started and contributed to a number of forums and blogs... and to be honest, I'd say keep the articles for yourself. If you want to use someone elses and give them the link, that's fine. No harm done IMO. But the more unique articles you can write and publish on your own site the better off you'll be, IMO.

People do naturally link to you as they find your site and find interesting content. I didn't believe it was that easy at first... but it is. And by chance, I've found a lot of my natural linkers use exactly the anchor text I would have them use

[allreal]

I understand keeping them to my site only for a few weeks to allow it to get picked up on my site first and SEO.

However, would I not be limiting myself if I didn't release these to article directories after say 2 weeks?

Whats the pros? cons?

Also if I submit them to article directory, does that give them the permission to do whatever they want e.g. - take out my company info, name, remove advertisers?

Thanks for the help. A very interesting process here.

[Dustin07]

Pros to submitting, You'll gain backlinks with the anchor text of your choice from the article directory itself. You'll gain a small amount of traffic at first, mostly from people viewing the article directory though and reviewing your article and site to see if they deem you as a competitor.

Cons to submitting, your content isn't so unique anymore. Most people (yes most IMO) will download your article and post it on their site without giving your links, OR they will link incorrectly. This is an unfortunate truth to article directores.

Submitting one article to each of the directories will gain a link of your chosing from each of those directories. So submitting one article would be worthwhile, for sure.

However beyond that would become redundant. The articles I think would just be stolen and misused, and the added links would really only come from article directory sites that already link to you.

I hope that's not too negative, just based upon my experience. I'm submitted probably over a hundred times, and I've even made a list of my favorite directories

[allreal]

Dustin -
Thanks for the honest feedback.
Yes - the biggest fear is someone stealing you unique content by not linking it back to you, which is the whole point.

Whats the difference between submitting it to 1 directory or 100 directories are all not affiliated. Isn't this similar to submitting your site to tons of human edited directories?

Thanks for all the help.

[Dustin07]

There are thousands of directories out there, but very few are worthwhile. Unfortunately some require a lot of work just to get your article submitted, but by the time you get that all through you find out that either

1. it isn't working correctly
2. your href code isn't compatible with whatever their linking code is
3. or they are human edited and you are waiting for someone to approve your article

the last item may never happen. I've found some of these directories aren't even touched anymore yet are still hosted.

here is a page on my site that has the article directories. If I remember right, there was only 5 that i would visit on a regular basis. Do a search for "Dustin Twiggs" on goarticles.com under 'author search' and you'll get an idea of what types of articles I've posted, how many times they got downloaded, the links I used, etc. Also, from there you can see what type of article titles spiked the largest interest in downloads (I started screwing around with onsite SEO even just for my articles so they'd get more downloads!) You can do searches for different article titles then on Google or whereever, find my articles that were downloaded, and see how many were published with links... and how many without.
jakeyourlilly.com/secret/articlesandforums.html

I know it looks kind of funny, but at the time I was discussing links a lot with people at tons of different sites and I needed a quick referrence. Both of the directories, and of the forums I was visiting because I started to forget where I was posting different questions.


sorry for the novel

[Duilen]

I agree with Dustin. Publish your own articles rather than mass syndicating. As search engines become more sophisticated backlinks from duplicate content will become less valuable. Over the last year alone these backlinks have dropped significantly in value.