What's the 411 about articles and back links?

Lots of people talk about article submission as a great way of getting back links but I'm not so sure how well it works.

6 months ago I wrote and published an ezine article and I have yet to see the link show up in ANY back link checking system.

None of the back link check systems I used found the links in the article. Is that just ezine or are article based links going out of favor?

The article was scraped by some really shitty spamblog and that link shows up to my site on one back link checker. But the original article link is MIA.

I realize there are side benefits to article marketing that I am not looking to get into here.

It seems there are lots of services out there selling article spining and submission services.

What's the deal?

Just because you can't see the backlink from the article site doesn't mean the search engines don't know about it. And you may have answered your own question as to why the ezine article backlink doesn't show up - duplicate content. They found the spam blog post of the article first and decided to show that backlink instead of ezine link.

I don't use article marketing that much to drive traffic, it is just another part of my backlinking process. I write an article that can be super spun and submit it everywhere I can - article sites, web 2.0 blog sites, profile pages that allow you to have a blog. I have been doing okay for a new site that is only 6 months old, watching the site climb the SERPs.

One trick I picked up recently is this - if a site allows it, don't just post one article and never visit that profile again, (as you write more articles on the same subject) post spun versions on that same profile blog (once a week or once a month) and ping it. It'll get the search engines visiting the profile and picking up your links.

I think some people use article sites to drive traffic to their money site. They submit an article to an article site like ezine or goarticles and use the authority of the site to rank the article in the search engines. Then they build tons of links to the article page hoping for traffic to their money page from that.

The original article ranks very high. The spam blog does not show due to duplicate content.

All link checkers do not show the article link... not just G.

I know that not 100% of your existing links show in a "link:" search. There are tools that show you most of them. Yahoo shows spamish links I get from 3rd part scraper sites, all my true organic links and ones that I have built myself.

I just wonder if other people have problems getting links from article sites indexed. Especially e-zine. I've seen lots of noobs in Dp saying stuff like "I posted an article on ezine and the link does not show up, it's been a whole 24 hours". I'm not doing/saying crap like that.

I wanted to know some professional opinions.

I just find it odd that an an article that ranks so high will give me no link juice that I can see over 6 months later. I ranks #2 for a broad match for my search terms.

Frustrating to give great content away an not even get a verifiable link back.

Here's a tip for article submission - if you don't want the article to rank for your keywords: Write an article on any topic, put your "targeted keyword" link to your site in your author box. You get the link juice from the article site for your anchor text, but your article will not rank for your targeted keywords.

If you want to see if your article is indexed, just do a search for the article URL in G. Don't forget to ping your article page.

I gave up article submissions a long time ago, they just waste time in my opinion and nothing else.

unless you expect human traffic there is no advantage submitting your articles to top (ezine, etc) directories. Too much work and wait to get a link.

I submit spun article with magic article submitter to hundreds article sites and get over time about 50-100 backlinks. They are not too high of the quality but good for diversification.


pk

Keep in mind that when you link to article directory, the juice of your linking splits between your target site and article directory pages(internal linking).

You have few links from your article and article directory has dozens of internal links.