I think you are right in what you’re saying, article marketing alone is never going to win you a competitive niche, however I still like to use it for building deep links and yes pointing the odd one back at deep pages. I think you can rank well using article marketing but you are going to need more to dominate in a competitive niche.

Before I changed the title and focus of this site I ranked first page for “seo consultant” using nothing but articles, so it is possible.

I think you have hit on a very valid point with building links to links, I use this technique often. I may have a link on a deep page of a trusted domain, however it may not be indexed. Fire a couple of articles at it and social bookmarks and before you know it you have an anchored link, PR3 on the deep page of a PR7 homepage domain.

As you say I know of pages on goarticles that outrank TLD’s in the most competitive industries, not particularly a huge link profile but one full of quality, thanks for the input.

Dependant on the Niche, sometimes you don’t even need a site, hubpages are pretty good for this. I also recently seen a GoArticle outranking lots of sites to be number 1 for a really competitive keyword (it did have an excellent link profile).

Everyone has there favourite directories but you might want to check out this link;

http://dofollow001.com/blog/10-dofollow-article-directories

They are all dofollow and of a decent quality.

I personally like to use the unique article wizard for my distribution, then I will simply post a unique copy yo goarticles and ezinearticles, and sometimes articleblast.

Doing article marketing is time consuming, but to be honest I don’t really know many ‘white-hat’ link building techniques that aren’t. You have to think about what makes a good link as well, I like to look at domain metrics, if the homepage of a site has a PR5 or above, getting a link from that domain, even on a deep page is high value, that is why I like using high PR article directories.

Link building is a pain I know, but if you dedicate 4 – 8 hours a week to it you will benefit in the long run.

For instance, Buzzle specifically states; Duplicate content not allowed.
With buzzle, by the way, I fond it excrutiatingly slow to navigate around their site — but maybe it’s my computer.

And ArticleBase, as I mentioned once before here, I’m sure is a NoFollow site.

Could you say whether such a list is readily available ?

Lastly, do others feel it is very time consuming filing an article on the directories, even when all the various box items are pre-prepared (I do mine by copying my first posting on e-zine) ?

Thanks for any enlightenement, Jim R.

I here what your saying but we have found links to be of worth even on PR0 pages. Yes it’s nice to write articles that get republished, but even those articles sitting on deep pages carry a little juice and if you get enough will increase keyword rankings. We recenlty moved a site from page 5 to top 5 of Google based on article marketing and anchor text alone and the key phrase isn’t exactly short on competition.

The linkvana network has always been pretty clean and they have strict rules on unique content and and links. It’s almost like a paid article directory, sort of. It was always helpful for getting those important anchor texts and great for building links to niche websites, however like you say it looks like Google has had enough.

Those sites are getting deindexed because they were caught in the “paid links” scheme. People are ratting each other out because the ones who got deindexed wantes to get back into Google.

Article marketing is only good if you are writing quality content that people will either link to or publish it. If the article gets buried in the archives, it will just be PR 0 which gives you no juice.

Yes in my opinion Google is becoming better and better at clamping down on such networks, so even if it works now the chances are it won’t in the future.

You make a valid point about the duplicate content and I guess there are two things to clear up with regards to it.

1) The Duplicate Penalty

First thing is the talk of a penalty. Google’s view on duplicate content is straight forward, if two pages possess the same or similar content then the most authoritative domain will keep it’s page in the index and the other pages are tossed into the supplemental index, or basically never to be seen again.

2) Duplicate Indexing

Google still does add duplicate content to the main index, however there are a few rules that go along with it. All around the world news articles are been published on similar stories, using similar headlines and content, some even borrow content from other news sites. All this ‘similar’ content is not cast into the fire except for the most authoritative sources item.

If you have a domain with ‘exceptional’ authority, ie alot of link equity and editorial references. Then you can get away with publishing duplicate content. Certain article directories have the sort of link equity we are talking about, not many but some do. These pages even though they may have duplicate articles, will be indexed regardless as Google views them as authoritative sources and therefore useful.

This is why I advise to publish to the most authoritative. If you want to publish to some of the less authoritative then I suggest spinning. Goarticles, ezine, articlebase etc…. these sites always seem to be indexed regardless of duplicate issues.

Hope that helps.