Submitting Articles to Multiple Directories = Spamming?

I recently posted an update to my bum marketing project in which I talked a bit about article directory submissions, and in particular, how I plan to take a single article, re-write it a bunch of times using various techniques, and then submit to as many article directories as possible.

In the comments section of that post, one of my readers, Mark Dykeman thought it sounded a bit like spamming. Here is what he said:

I hate to sound critical, so forgive me, but this strategy seems a bit like spamming, albeit in a benign manner. Aren’t there any concerns about how the author will be perceived in the blogosphere, niche areas, etc. when some people start to connect the dots and realise that a) a lot of the content is very similar and b) it’s all coming from the same person? Again, I’m not trying to be negative, but I’m just wondering if this is a possible side-effect of bum marketing?

Great question! I did think about this a lot before embarking on the process. I actually see two separate issues:

1. The ethical issue – serving up a bunch of re-hashed information
2. The technical issue – possible duplicate content penalty from Google

The Ethical Issue

I’ll address the ethical issue first as that is the question that’s being asked by Mark. Ok first of all the facts – yes indeed I will be taking one article topic and distributing variations of that article across the web via multiple article directories. Now here’s why I think it’s alright to do this:

• Article directories are repositories for content publishers
• The directories do not require exclusivity (none that I am using anyway)
• Most authors will submit the exact same article, at least I am re-writing mine!
• Most readers will not see these ‘duplicated’ articles

Let me explain those points in a little more depth…

Article Directories as Repositories

The purpose of article directories is to provide a repository of royalty-free articles that can be used freely by content publishers. By the very nature of the beast, these articles are designed to be duplicated and re-published in other places. This may be on content sites, blogs, as part of an auto-responder sequence etc.

EzineArticles has guidelines for publishers that includes – “Respect the copyrights of the authors by publishing the entire article as it is with no changes.” So obviously this means that the articles will be distributed as is all over the Internet.

No Exclusivity Clauses

Certainly for the directories that I am using, I read all the author guidelines carefully and so far none have stated that the submitted articles must be exclusive to that directory. Usually the main stipulation is that it must be your own work.

Quoting EzineArticles again, here is the first one of their author guidelines – “You declare that you are the sole owner and author of the article and own 100% of all copyrights pertaining to it.”

I am of course the sole author of all the articles that I plan to submit.

Exact Duplication v Re-Writes

For each directory that I investigate I have done a search for existing articles relating to the topic of my niche. In many directories I have seen the same article by the same author pop up over and over and they all look exactly the same. I am at least going to the effort of re-writing them. However this is more to avoid the technical issue.

Now I have seen these duplicate articles which I believe is the very concern that Mark is expressing but my next point explains why I don’t think it’s a problem.

Users Will Not See the Duplicates

When I talk about users in this context, I mean individual people who are reading the articles because they are interested in them. I’m not talking about the content publishers who republish the articles for their own purposes.

I am assume this is what Mark is talking about here – those individuals in the niche who’ll search for articles and turn up the same results. Consider how a user will find the content:

• Directly via the Article Directory
• Google search – article turns up in search results
• From an external source that has re-published the article

I imagine that the most common way that a user would find the article is via the directory itself. Now here is the key thing – I will only ever submit a unique article to each directory. The re-written versions go out to all the different directories. Let me show you this with a diagram:

Each different colour represents a completely different article topic and the different shades of that colour are the re-written versions. For example, all the green articles are pretty much the same.

Now how does a user typically find articles? Does he regularly search 20 directories? I doubt it. I imagine that most people would have one or two favourites that they use and that is all. So picking one particular directory, here is what my collection of articles would look like:

See, they are all different. I do not submit re-written versions of an article to a single directory though I know other people who do this, and yes, it’s very annoying.

The articles may find their way into search engines but let me tell you, this is very difficult to do! I am doing careful keyword research to pick articles that have a chance of doing well and the chances are that only one or two directories have any glimmer of a chance to get into the top 10 results so really, there’s no way these articles will flood the serps.

For republished content, obviously I have no control over that but again, I’m guessing that most content publishers would pick just one or two directories as their chosen source of information.

The Technical Issue

Mark didn’t specially ask about this but I thought I would talk about it anyway. To be honest, I know very little about SEO, and about Google and how they rank things. I try not to worry my little head over such things.

All I do know is that they don’t like duplicate content so I personally would never use an article from one of these directories to republish because I would be worried about the penalty.

The mashup method that I am using at the moment is nothing more than paragraph rotation which means that each individual paragraph will still find itself duplicated. Hopefully in the context of the entire article and the page that it is published on, that is not enough to trigger the penalty.

A more desirable solution would be to run some kind of re-writer tool (I’m going to check a couple of these out) over the articles after the paragraph rotation had been done.

Your Thoughts?

I’m always interested in what readers have to say, especially when the subject matter can be deemed controversial. So firstly to Mark, does this alleviate your concerns? Or do you think I’ve just written a load of rubbish to mask the fact that I’m a scumbag spammer :)

So what do you guys think? Should I stick to one directory? If so, which one? If everybody did that wouldn’t that put all the other directories out of business? And whilst we’re on that subject, just why are there so many directories anyway?

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