Article marketing and submission of duplicated content

People often ask questions, if they should submit to 5 sites or to 100+ sites, if Google will consider their content to be unique or not. I going to answer these questions and share results of split testing.

I'm going to talk about results we have got by doing a split testing of article submission process. Before this I'd like to tell a little about what split testing is. Assume, you have two methods and you'd like to estimate their efficiency. The idea of split testing is trying to test both methods under similar conditions. For article marketing this means that we have submitted articles and focused them on keywords with almost equal competition. To check the competition rate we used data from WordTracker and Google Adwords. Sure, there might be some differences, but we think that they have not affected our research.

Our goal was to measure the position of our web-site in search engines for two keywords and understand what kind of submission works better and gives a better effect. We did a number of tests and checked results carefully. The short answer is: you will not harm much if you will submit the same article to 100+ sites, but it is better to submit a unique content. Find my explanation below.

First, we did this test just 2 months ago, so Google might change its opinions about article submission we did. Also, if it works today there is no guaranty it will work in future and will give the same SEO effect.

Second, we were able to measure SEO effect from submission to 5 major article sites and submission to 100+ sites. I can say that submission of one article to 5 major sites will give you a 60-70% performance out of 100% possible. If you do submission to 100+ sites the effect is slightly different. I'd say the performance is about 70%-80%. We have got the best effect if submit a different versions of the same article to 100+ sites. The difference was in title, keywords used, description and article text.

To have a different articles we have complied the 3 major versions of the article and then added some variations to the keywords inside the article. For instance, in the version version text might looks like "article marketing" in the second version it looked like "marketing with article submission".

Does it worth submitting unique articles to 100+ sites or just submit to 5 major sites. In terms of efficiency I'd say that it is better to submit one unique article to 5 major web-sites and purchase a bulk submission to 100+ sites. Even if content is the same you will have a good SEO results, good don't think (for now) that this content is a duplicated content. I think that the reason is that many article sites brings additional value to the published article, e.g. publish articles related to the niche link to other articles by this author.

Very important question - should you put article you submit to your web-site? Sure it's better for site content to be unique, but we have tried to put the modified copy of article to our web-site. We have added some text, put a little more information and links. Results? Google likes to send traffic to these articles.

Learn more about article marketing in ArticleKickOff e-book by Alex Savkin.