Can You Still Get Traffic From Article Directories?

[Vampa]

One mistake many webmasters make is focussing on trying to get lot of traffic at once. It's nice, yeah, but the better way to grow your audience is by getting a little traffic from lots of different sources. Those who like the content you post will become loyal readers. And your audience keeps growing.

Though Google penalized most article directories these sites still get some traffic.

There are people who used to visit these sites long before they were penalized and because they got information they sought there, they still from time to time visit these sites and smart webmasters could get some traffic from these sites.

Don't listen to all the lies. Article directories aren't dead. They still can be a good source of traffic.

I could be wrong though. What do you guys think?

 

[iKnowThings]

Article directories are on their way out. Nobody likes them as much as they like specific directories. The problem is that it is completely and entirely dedicated to selling ad space on other people's work, and there is no other intrinsic value that they provide to the Internet. In other words, the system is always a middleman that exists to leech.

 

[fcuco]

I don't think it is worth it. After Google Penguin you really need to carefully balance the traffic that you could get out of article directories versus the hit that your own rank is going to take when Google punishes your site because it is using an Article Directory for linkbuilding. The traffic that you could get out of directories is actually a poisonous gift. Those sites were not the only ones to be penalized, blogs that used them were too to a degree!

There is a Youtube video that you should watch, search for "Should I build links using article directories?" a you will see what I mean.

 

[AnkitaaGD]

I do have articles over at some article directories, but once I heard about the Google update regarding article directories, I stopped submitting to them. Fortunately I remembered to update the links as well, so my websites are safe. I wish that wasn't the case though. It was just so easy to build links with article directories.

Anyway, I believe article directories are not completely dead because I still receive reports from them saying my articles are doing well. But why mess with Google at all? It's just better to rely on good content on my own websites, and hope to the Lord I get some good backlinks

 

[fcuco]

It was just so easy to build links with article directories.

Well, that was sort of the reason for them to get targeted by Google, Google saw the whole thing as people basically gaming the system and that type of link building is actually considered black hat SEO stuff now, that's why they punished not only the directories themselves but all the sites that were using them to get back links too. They were basically page rank farms