How to Correctly do Article Submissions and Article Spinning for Driving Traffic to your eCommerce Store?

Article Submission & Spinning for eCommerce SEO

One of the most popular questions that we receive from our members are about article submission and article spinning, and whether it is best to submit one article to many article directories, or spin the article and submit multiple versions of the same article. There are good arguments for both sides of the issue, and in the article below, I’ll try to talk about what I’ve found to work best for eCommerce sites and online stores.

Duplicate Content

While Google does have a duplicate content filter (notice this is a filter, not a penalty for duplicate content) and when you submit one article you will get some good quality Google links initially – this phenomenon will gradually decline as many of your articles are placed into what is known as the “supplement results” index or “google sandbox”, as its commonly referred to. Thus, spinning articles and consequently submitting multiple versions of those articles (via automated programs like Article Announcer or Article Post Robot) is advantageous for most people because they will generate more links in Google – which is, after all, one goal of article submission in the first place.

On a personal note, I typically write one version that is completely different from any content that I have on my site – and then submit it via eZineArticles and iSnare.

Article Spinning: Huge Time Investment

When it comes to spinning multiple versions of the same article for submission, I’ve “been there and done that” – and found it to be a huge investment in time. Spinning one article into two hundred similar articles in no small feat; don’t be fooled into thinking you can spend ten minutes, an hour, or even a few hours in a large number of articles and end up with a product that reads well, is engaging, and would pass for original content from a great writer.

It doesn’t work that way – and we shouldn’t expect article spinning to produce great results. After all, we are dealing with a piece of software and not a flesh-and-blood human with thought processes and ideas. And while you can pass off these awkward-reading articles to some article directories that are best referred to as “junk article sites” that don’t care what they publish, the good article directories (those whose links count the most when it comes to SERP) hand-edit their articles.

Yes, they read them – all of them. And they are adept are screening out mechanically generated junk articles. What’s more, the search engines, especially Google, know these junk sites well – and the links that you get from them won’t get you (or your website) far.

So when spinning two hundred awkwardly written articles from one good quality article, plan on investing a huge chunk of your time in editing and revising these articles so that they have some resemblance to content that is readable. In fact, the time to revise two hundred junk articles could be considered mind-boggling, even if you’re outsourcing the work to someone else.

The next “fun” part of the whole spinning/submitting process is submitting each one of these articles; again, a huge investment in time. Or, you might choose to submit ten versions or so via a program like Article Announcer. The process will take you hours of time for rewriting and submission.

Hand Written Content Rules the Day

On the other hand, you could take a cue from my past success. I pay some of my article writers ~ $5/per article, which is roughly a penny per word. I read over the article, spruce it up some (which takes me around ten minutes or so), and then submit it via eZineArticles and iSnare and I’m done. In around two hours, for the cost of $50, I can get ten quality articles out there. Ten articles that are on a myriad of different topics, crossing different categories and reaching different articles; ten articles spun with even the best spinning software are basically all the same.

What’s more, Yahoo and MSN will count a lot more of those links than Google tends to, so if I have 200 posts of each article, I will end up hundreds of links on these search engines (and just as an FYI, not everyone uses Google).

One huge advantage to putting out quality articles is that some very cool sites will want to pick them up. As an example, I posted an article on Wednesday or Thursday of one week and by the following Monday I had received a request from a site that was ranked at a PR6 to use that article; this was a free PR link with a high-ranking site that would have cost me around fifty bucks a month if I had to purchase it – but since it was a professional site there was no possibility of buying it because it wasn’t for sale at any price – which is the kind of link that we all want.

What’s Best for You?

In sum, my position on article submission is that quality articles must be written by human beings, and preferably human beings with a good grasp on the English language. If you’re like most of us, time is our most precious commodity, so test out both spinning and not-spinning to see which works best for you. I think you’ll find that submitting ten quality articles written “by hand” is more beneficial to your website than spinning out two hundred awkward, mechanically written articles. Only you, however, can know for sure what is best for your business and your particular needs.