What Is Article Submission in SEO?

Article submission means writing an article, then handing it to a website that agrees to publish it. Your name goes on the piece. So does a link back to you. That is the whole definition. It was one of the large tactics of the 2000s.

Everything else is covered elsewhere on this site. The old directories. What Google did to them. Which places still carry weight, and how to submit safely. None of that gets repeated here. Neither does the trade underneath it, which swaps a page of your writing for a line of HTML.

This page is about the word sitting in the middle of the query. Submit.

Submit Is a Word About Somebody Being Able to Say No

Think about where else the word turns up. A paper goes to a journal. Tenders go in on a Friday. Somewhere a manuscript reaches a publisher.

Every one has a person at the far end. Somebody able to read what you sent, then turn it down.

So a submission is not a delivery. Rather it is a request.

And what you request is not publication. It is agreement. Somebody read this and thought it worth putting in front of their readers.

That was the whole of what you were buying. Filing a spam report to Google has the same shape, a request rather than a delivery. The outreach process is mostly finding somebody who might say yes.

A Place That Takes Everything Is Not Receiving Submissions

Now hold the old article directories up against that word. Plenty took nearly everything. Send a piece in and it appeared. Some ran a check on the way through, and almost nothing failed it.

So look at what never happened. A check nothing fails is no standard. Nobody agreed to a thing.

You could always write the article yourself. That half was never scarce. What you cannot manufacture is another person deciding your writing was worth their audience. The one thing in the deal you could not produce yourself.

Take the decision out. What is left?

A file, on somebody’s server, with your name on top.

Which is a deposit rather than a submission. The word promised a judgment. Meanwhile nobody was going to make one.

Somebody Will Point at Guest Posting

Fair enough. Pitch a real publication and there is an editor at the other end. Plenty of pitches come back refused. That is submission in the full sense of the word.

Only look at what the objection concedes. One word covering two acts. In one of them a person can turn you down. Yet in the other nobody ever could.

Nothing about the word separates them. It reads the same on an invoice either way.

So the word cannot report on itself. You have to go and look.

Writing Better Only Pays Where Somebody Could Refuse You

Here is where it gets uncomfortable.

Say your article is good. Better than good. Now send it somewhere publishing anything at all. What did the quality buy you there?

Nothing. The place would have run it regardless. So the work landed in the content and left the placement untouched.

Then run it backwards. Send a middling piece to a publication holding a real standard. It comes back refused.

Notice what moved in both cases. The standard did.

So quality is not worthless here. It simply cannot pay on its own. Good writing needs somebody able to refuse it, since a refusal is what makes acceptance mean anything.

Which lands somewhere nobody wants to land. The first move on an article submission is not the article. Rather it is finding a place holding a standard, since that is what turns writing into something worth having.

A Year With No Refusals Is Not a Good Year

That instruction is unpleasant, since aiming higher means being turned down more often.

So read your own record the other way round. Every piece you sent last year got published? Then you were never submitting. Instead you were depositing, a dozen times over, into places holding no standard to fail.

Refusals are no evidence the work is going badly. Rather they are the plainest evidence you get that a standard exists at the far end.

Nobody sells it that way.

Getting Turned Down Costs You Almost Nothing

Here is the part that runs in your favour.

A refusal is quiet. Nothing gets published about it. No competitor reads it, and no customer ever finds out you were turned down in March.

So the cost of aiming high is an unanswered email. Meanwhile the cost of aiming low is an article you gave away, plus a placement nobody chose.

Those are not the same size. Aim high, then. The worst thing waiting up there is silence.

Where the Article Submission Argument Stops

A refusal is no grade on your writing. Editors say no for reasons having nothing to do with you. They ran that subject last month. Somebody else is halfway through it. Read a no as a ruling on the article and you learn the wrong thing.

Not everything called a submission asks to be judged, either. You submit a sitemap. A listing gets submitted too. Nobody grades those, since each is a record rather than a request.

And none of this says the writing does not matter. It matters a great deal. Only it is the price of being read at all, rather than the thing you were buying.

None of it is a claim about how search works. What a placement is worth to a ranking is a separate question. That question belongs with article marketing as a strategy, not here.

Where To-The-TOP! Sits On This

SEO Company To-The-TOP! has been doing this work since 2007. That list of websites willing to run your article turns up often enough here in Calgary. Its length is the trouble with it.

The first useful question is not how to write the piece. Rather it is who at the other end is allowed to say no. That question comes out of ordinary search engine optimization work. It was never a question a tool was built to answer. Whatever comes back points at the standard rather than at you.

No guarantees. Positions move over three to six months, slower in a thick market. Where a business needs customers this quarter, a Google Ads campaign does that faster than any article will. The portfolio shows the keywords this work has reached. Placement sits inside the website promotion half of what To-The-TOP! does.

The Test on Your Own Submissions

Take the last five articles you placed. Beside each one, write the name of the person who could have refused it.

Perhaps a name comes for every line. Then you were submitting, and each placement holds a decision inside it.

Or perhaps the column comes back empty. Nobody could have said no, since nobody was reading. That is no failing of yours. It belongs to the place you sent it to.

No statistic about other people’s articles settles which of those you hold. Yours sits in your sent folder.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does article submission still work for SEO?

It turns on where you are submitting, and almost nothing else. A placement on a website that publishes anything carries whatever such a placement carries. Meanwhile one somebody agreed to run is a different object.

What is the difference between article submission and guest posting?

Often nothing at all. Both mean writing something, then asking somebody else to publish it. Submission became the word for the directories, guest posting the word for real publications. What separates them is whether anybody at the far end could turn you down.

How many articles should I submit?

That is the question everybody asks, and it points the wrong way. Two placements somebody agreed to run are worth more than twenty nobody read. Count refusals, not submissions.

Is article submission a black hat tactic?

Bulk submission into directories built purely for links has a poor reputation. It earned it. Writing something worth running, then asking a real publication to run it, is ordinary work. Doing it in bulk, for the link rather than the reader, is what draws attention to a business.

Does an article have to be original to submit it?

In practice yes, and originality was rather the point the old tactic missed. Publishing one article in fifty places collects fifty copies rather than fifty decisions. Whether the copies are worth having is a separate question.