In this article I am going to talk about why submitting your articles to lots and lots of article directories is not worth your time and effort.

A few years ago submitting articles to hundreds of article directories was a great way to get visibility to your website and links to your website. Therefore I joined in and did the same as many others. Purchasing software that would enable me to send loads of articles to different article directories at the push of a button.

It seemed great and a really easy way of doing things. I sat back and waited to see the great results unfold. I began to see some results. Visitors to my website. Slight changes in my websites rank in the search engines.

So I started to do the same thing with a couple of my other websites.

However, there were a few websites that I didn’t use this strategy with. After a while I had a look at the results more thoroughly.

The websites that I had not used mass article submission with were doing as well as and in one case even better than my other websites – they were ranking well and getting visits.

This got me thinking. While I was thinking about this Google did an update. You can probably guess what happened. The sites that I had not used this strategy with stayed where they were. However, my other sites that had links from a whole load of article directories disappeared from the search engines.

So I spent some time looking properly at my results and analysing them.

I found that the referral traffic I was getting to the websites that I had used mass article submission with was only from a couple of article directory sites. Now, I had sent articles to hundreds of sites but I only got visitors from a couple! What a waste of effort! OK, the software was doing the submitting for me but I had spent time spinning these articles and that does take time!

I was cross with myself because not only had I been doing something that was a waste of time I had also been using a strategy that long term had caused my sites to disappear from the search engine.

If I had checked my results sooner I might have realised it was a waste of my effort and just concentrated on the couple of article directories that were bringing my sites visitors.

Instead I had believed the hype and what other people were saying was working and just gone along with it.

I learnt quite a few very important lessons from this experience.

1. Always test your own results – just because something works for someone else doesn’t necessarily mean it will work exactly the same way for you.
2. Don’t bother with mass article submission.
3. Focus instead on submitting to a few article directories and write more articles to these few.