Article Directories

I’ve done some link building using article directories before, but I recently had a thought that they might be worthless these days. The search engines are always updating their algorithms (particularly Google) to present users with the most accurate results for their search terms. Since the search engines work so hard to drop link farms from their results, surely article directories now fall into that bracket?

If you didn’t know, an article directory is usually a free directory (like this one) that accepts an article of between 300 and 500 words with a resource box at the end. The resource box contains up to 3 links to your website(s), often with deep links into your content. Since links are embedded within content, they are supposed to be marginally more valuable than bog standard directory submissions. Standard directory submissions are merely a link to your site with your specified anchor text.

Surely these article directories are fairly easy to identify now? I’m sure there’s a heuristic that can flag a website as being a link farm of sorts? Being a low quality site, does that mean the links back from the directory (if they’re ever indexed) are actually worthless?

Since it’s usually the case where you pay for an article to be written and submitted to a load of directories, is that a waste of money?

In the past I’ve paid for this service, and it had some benefits. However, I had a really long think about it relating to a new project of mine. I can’t help but think that it’s an old-fashioned and lazy link building approach. I say lazy because you can pay someone to write a terrible article for $5, and submit it (using software) to 200 directories for just $15.

I’ve been experimenting with a new technique for building links and traffic, but it’s really early days yet. For the moment, I can only see it working for certain niches. I might report on my findings in the future. :)

In the meantime, I found an interesting and provoking article entitled 4,439 Words on Driving Traffic to Your Blog. It’s a good read and well worth bookmarking.