Article submission to high authority directories are a great way to get an authority backlink. However, be sure that having many links coming from the same directory will not do all that much for your rankings.

2/3 submissions may carry weight, but I’m beginning to wonder whether having more than that is not merely ignored but can actually contribute towards your site getting a slap (i.e. the assumption is that you’re trying to game the search engines ) at least while the site is less than a year old and/or doesn’t yet have a good variety of other backlinks coming in yet.

The idea does sound plausible to me as I have seen a mass of posts on the same topic appear under various author names all published over a course of days, if not the same day. I’m talking double digit submissions here.

This can serve a purpose though – swamping out the directory makes you look like the expert on the topic (or a freak, or an obvious salesman trying to push a product take your pick), and should drive a significant quantity of traffic to the target landing page.

So if you’re going to write articles for SEO purposes, use multiple submission sites. This should go without saying, but I got a bit lazy and couldn’t be bothered to sign up for other directories, squidoo, hubpages etc.

I also wanted to quickly get to platinum status in ezine articles – but I only ended up as Basic Plus after the first 10 articles were submitted as I did get a few articles flagged. I guess I am further than most people by getting as far as I have without outsourcing.

(In fact I’m just listening to an interview with Chris Knight in 2008, and he states less than 15% of the ezine articles members at the time have submitted more than 10 articles. Furthermore, to gain authority over your niche, you should write 25-250 articles. For better SEO of your own website, you may wish to spread submissions between several directories to leverage the variety of backlinks coming from different authority sources.)

Now I’ve only just recently submitted an article to squidoo and another to hubpages, which may have helped with the latest re-ranking menti0ned in y last post. I say these new sites may have helped with the re-ranking as I can see that yahoo has counted them, but the links do not appear in google webmaster tools, therefore I don’t know for sure that google has seen these and taken them into account.

That said, if page rank updates are ongoing, but are only made public periodically, then there’s no reason why the same too could not apply to counting links before they are publicly mentioned in webmaster tools.

Finally, remember, it’s one thing to get a link, to get a relevant link is another. Publishing to article submission sites is one of the best ways to get relevant backlinks as the websites that republish the articles should be related to the subject matter that your article is about. If you’re lucky enough to get a site with some PR republishing your link, then that’s even better.

So there are three good benefits from article publishing, squidoo and hubpages publishing:

1. High authority do-follow backlink (assuming you are submitting to a directory like ezine articles)
2. Trickle of Traffic (unless you write about a really hot topic(s) with a compelling reason for people to click through to your link then you can expect to enjoy at least 1 or 2 visits per day/week depending on quality and/or quantity of articles  and the demand for the subject matter of the article(s).
3. Article Directories only: additional backlinks. As some article submission sites offer republication rights to the public as a condition of authors using their service, and as the public in turn are expected to include your personal resource text with the article with dofollow, then you start getting free backlinks from sites relevant to your subject matter.

   Squidoo and Hubpages only: you can earn money directly from these platforms. I gather some people have created good income streams from hubpages in particular, but obviously you will have to submit a load of popular and in demand pages to get to that level.