Are Article Directories Worth It?

Added by Dave on July 19, 2012

A month ago when I was in an SEO frenzy (alright, I’m still in an SEO frenzy), I decided I wanted to test out some things I had been reading on increasing traffic. It seems like every SEO blog has it’s own “home remedy” on what to do to increase traffic. Y’know, hop on one foot while singing I’m a little tea pot, that sort of thing.

Well, I tried that and it didn’t work.

I decided to stick to some more conventional methods, things like article directories, website directories, those sort of things. I lot of people TALK about these things as being useful but no one ever seems to list the stats…

Given that it’s been about a month I thought it an opportune time to provide an update on my progress as well as a recommendation on whether or not article directories are worth it.

What Are Article Directories?

Essentially article directories are websites that just host articles from other websites. They don’t actually produce their own content, they’re more like a directory…of…articles. You can go on the website and search through tons of different topics. As far as I can tell the perceived benefits to a blogger are two fold:

Get your name out to another source, maybe people see your article, like your content, and go to your blog, thus turning the directory into a kind of referral source.
By providing a link in the author bio you are getting a one way link to your blog, which should help with Google page rank.

I think the main benefit is #2 but I won’t argue that #1 could also be a nice ancillary benefit if it worked out that way.

What I did

I didn’t want to go overboard here because it does take some time but I wanted to give it the old college try. I took three of my articles that I thought represented some decent content. These articles were:

Best Apartment Shares
Best Hostel Websites
My Favorite Plugins

I submitted them to ten article directories, which from a bit of research, I determined were at the very least reputable. They were:

Just to give you a general idea this took about 1.5 hours. You essentially have to register at each site and then fill out the form for the article. In most cases I found that my articles were approved once reviewed (big caveat here). Some of my articles are STILL in review after 30 days and I have noted that below. Let’s take a look at the results, splitting it out by each hypothesis I mentioned above.

What Were The Results?

Hypothesis 1: Submitting articles to directories increases their exposure and provides traffic to my website.

I made a table (sorry for not wanting to make two separate ones) which summarizes”

Whether or not the articles I submitted were approved (or if they are still in review, or if they were never submitted)
How many views they got ON THE DIRECTORY ITSELF (not referrals, I’ll address that later)

	Best Apartment Shares	Best Hostel Websites	My Favorite Plugins
Amazines.com	Approved – 22	Approved – 29	Approved – 18
Articlebin.com	Unknown (website down)	Unknown (website down)	Unknown (website down)
Articlebiz.com	Waiting For Review	Waiting For Review	Waiting For Review
Articlecity.com	Waiting For Review	Waiting For Review	Waiting For Review
Articlecube.com	Waiting For Review	Waiting For Review	Waiting For Review
Articlesbase.com	Approved – 2	Approved – 1	Not Submitted
Articletrader.com	Waiting For Review	Waiting For Review	Not Submitted
Ezinearticles.com	Approved – 15	Approved – 13	Not Submitted
Goarticles.com	Approved – 2	Approved – 1	Approved – 1
Isnare.com	Waiting For Review	Waiting For Review	Not Submitted

Well that was disappointing. After a month over 50% of my articles are STILL IN REVIEW. Of the ones that were approved, only Amazines.com and Ezines.com seem to have any hope of actually sending traffic to my blog. Let’s check Google Analytics and see if I can find anything…

Hello little Ezinearticles referral – are you lost?

On further inspection I found 1 visit from Ezinearticles.com (this was consistent with what they reported, which was one click on the best apartments article) and 0 visits from Amazines.com

Given the sorry state of my article statuses as well as the poor performance of the ones I actually can report on, I am going to consider Hypothesis 1 DISPROVEN.

But what about hypothesis 2?

Hypothesis 2: By providing a link in the author bio you are getting a one way link to your blog, which should help with Google page rank.

I was pretty skeptical of hypothesis 1 from the the get go. My main hopes are in hypothesis 2. Most of these article directories have pretty high page ranks (4+). Let’s step back for a minute though and consider how this would work.

In my articles say on Ezinearticles:

I have a link to our homepage in the author bio.
It’s a dofollow link.
The page has a page rank of 6 (basically this is Ezinearticles’ page rank flowing through to its subpages).

This is definitely a recipe for success in terms of one way link building, so I moved forward in my search.

I checked my alexa.com. Still 79 sites linking in and none of them from the directories. I checked my page rank. Still 1, as it was before I submitted articles. I checked Google Webmaster.

found em (forgive me, no table):

Amazines.com – 1 inbound link

Articlesbase.com – 2 inbound links

Ezinearticles.com – 2 inbound links

Goarticles.com – 2 inbound links

Alright, so I did find a total of 5 inbound links via Google Webmaster, but to be fair, Google Webmaster also claims that I have 7.6k inbound links (and yet our page rank is still a whopping 1 – not sure how to explain that one). At the end of the day, there were still no noticeable improvements in anything that mattered. I’m not going to say that hypothesis 2 is busted. The articles are on the web, they have the link back, it is being picked up (at least by someone), and the page rank is considerable. What I am going to do is give my two cents:

Conclusion: No – Article submission websites are NOT worth it.

I realize the jury is still out on many of these websites as half of my articles are still in review, but frankly, that’s also part of my point. In that 1.5 hrs I could have written a nice post, maybe had it guest posted and experienced immediate, tangible results in terms of more subscribers, views, and still achieved some sort of a page rank benefit. Article directories just don’t seem efficient and frankly I’m a little annoyed at how long the review process is. Invest your time somewhere else, like hopping on one foot and singing I’m a little tea pot.

However, if you are interested in article directories, here is the list that I gathered (NOTE: I did not submit to all of these).

https://www.interestingarticles.com
https://www.amazines.com
https://www.articlebin.com
https://www.articlebiz.com
https://www.articlecity.com/free_article_submission.php
https://www.ArticleCube.com
https://www.ArticlesBase.com
https://www.ArticleTrader.com
https://www.EzineArticles.com
https://www.goarticles.com
https://www.isnare.com
https://www.selfseo.com
https://www.WebWorldIndex.com
https://www.articleblast.com
https://www.articleclick.com
https://www.articledepot.co.uk
https://www.ArticlesFactory.com
https://www.bharatbhasha.com
https://www.devpointer.net
https://www.squidoo.com
https://www.hubpages.com
https://www.gather.com
https://www.articledashboard.com

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A Couple Travelers