Submitting your site content to article directories = your site in supplemental results?

[Matt Ward]

Has anyone experienced this?

When I first started this stuff in November, I had read several posts by people who said you should write articles, have them indexed on your own site, and then you could freely put them on article directories, etc.

Well, I did that with almost all of my articles.

Now that I have a bit more knowledge of SEO and keywords, etc, I've been looking up some of my stuff. Well, when I search for my keywords or chunks of text from my original articles, my site is almost always pushed into the supplemental results while the article directory versions (and sickeningly) autoblogs that scraped my articles rank higher. This is searching for something like "My name is mattward and I've been a dog lover for most of my life" in quotes, and ranking in the supplemental with autoblogs above me.

It would seem that although your site may be the first one indexed for content, if you republish it elsewhere, those sites might rank above you for it. I'm assuming this happens if your site is new and without any authority. In this case, it seems as though it was a terrible idea to syndicate my articles verbatim to directories and I don't think I'm going to be doing this anymore.

My question is this: should I go and rewrite my articles by hand so that they're completely unique to my site again? I don't know if I'm even getting proper credit for them anymore, since many of them are in the supplemental. A good number of my sites took a huge dump in the SERPS after the Panda update, and I can only feel like this may be the reason. I'm not sure if going through the trouble of rewriting everything would be effective or not.

(On a side note, I'm about to send some DMCAs and emails to Adsense regarding some of the people ripping off my content. Karma's a bitch.)

[dtang4]

I think the core issue here is your site lacks authority from Google's perspective. Instead of re-jigging your articles, I would try to SEO them to increase their authority.

In other words... in actual chronological sequence, you publish an article, then submit it to an article directory. However, from Google's perspective, they first come across the version on the article directory (first and more frequently); then, they crawl to your similar looking article and consider it duplicate content.

[Cantbedone!]

If you want any articles to rank and bring you extra traffic, obviously you will need to seo them. Create more backlinks. If you give em more juice than the other guys, you will eventually rank higher.

On a side note you seem to be pretty bothered by other sites displaying your content, yet you openly admit to submitting that very same content all over the web for backlinks. Am I missing something? If you don't want your content used on sites other than your own, perhaps you should rethink syndicating it all over the place. Just saying.

If the autoblogs are giving you backlinks and citing you as the original source of the article, they are no different than the article directories themselves or the people who syndicate articles from article directories (which is the whole point). Nothing wrong with that. If they are not giving you credit or they are removing the links, well thats a different story. I'd be pissed too.

I only chimed in because I've been through this quite a bit. I do a lot of article marketing. Auto blogs are more than welcome to repost my articles whether its from the directories where I submitted them or directly from my RSS feed as long as they keep my links in place and give me credit for my work. Thats the whole reason for putting them on article directories in the first place where anyone can legally and rightfully use them according to the terms of the directories.

For example, anyone who has an ezine account can use any article there on their own site as long as they follow ezines terms. Many directories have much more laid back terms. In short, if you submit to the directories, expect to see that content used all over the web. Thats how it works.