Article Syndication is Worthless for Backlinks

Newbie internet marketers seem to flock to article directories for whatever reason, probably because they allow just about anyone to publish content there. The bare truth is that article directories exist for one reason: to make Adsense bucks for the article directory owner off of users submitting their content. The backlinks are too weak to be worthwhile, while some people propose that “syndication” of your article (where webmasters copy your article and paste it to their websites with your resource box) is where the true link juice lies. But that angle is just a pipe dream, and there is almost no reason to employ article directories in your backlinking strategy.

How to check if your content has been “syndicated” (copied).

Traditional article syndication for backlinks works like this:

1. Post a piece of content on your blog.
2. Take that same piece of content and post it to an “authority” article directory likeezinearticles.com.
3. Check and see who is syndicating your content (see below for how to do this). If your article has been copied without a resource-box, then you can contact the person to request they add the resource box back in.
4. After you find out where your work has been syndicated, the next step is to contact those people and offer them further work before you publish it to article directories.

If you’ve written some content for a Web 2.0 property or an article directory, the usual way to check if your article is has been syndicated to any other websites is to search for a string of words in your article. Your string of words that you choose should select text from the end of one sentence or paragraph and into the start of the next for the best chance of getting a correct hit. The easiest way to do this is to setup a Google Alert for each article you write.

The problem with the article syndication model.

If links from article directories are worthless, then perhaps people will come to the article directories, copy an article, and paste it to their sites intact. This is the hope of article syndicators and it’s a pipe dream based on the following factors:

1. There is a large problem with the quality of the sites doing the syndication: they are generally poor quality. It’s not authority sites that are grabbing Ezine articles for their site. It’s new webmasters who want free content for their sites, or worse, auto-bloggers using scraping plugins to pull in your articles to their sites (often stripping out the resource box).
2. Cross domain duplicate content is not syndicated content. It’s glib to pretend that article directory syndication is the same type of syndication that the AP Newswire is performing. Article syndication is a form of deliberately duplicating content across multiple domains in order to manipulate search engine results, a practice that Google frowns upon. The only way to properly “syndicate” an article is to make sure that all other copies are “noindex”, which no website owner will consent to.