Article Marketing > The Curse of SEO Penalties on Your Marketing Articles – How to Avoid Them!

Marketing business websites through article submissions has indeed come a long way within these few short years. Earlier, an article marketing campaign meant submitting a single article about once a week to a single submission directory with a single link in the author's bio box below the article. The business owner would write the article from his or her own knowledge and even do the submitting work. But today, the whole scene has changed. Now businesses are employing a great deal of staff for the express purpose of article submissions and SEO. Every business worth its salt will have some professional article writers, who would relentlessly churn out high-quality articles, carefully scrutinized by an editorial department; while an expert SEO staff would handle the submission and the promotion of the article.

There are hundreds of thousands of original articles being submitted to the various article directories each single day. With such a heavy traffic of articles coming through each day, it has become very important to regulate the whole submission process in some manner. Knowing the potential of articles in promoting their businesses, article submitters are using search engine optimization to the hilt, which is not bad on the face. SEO can make your article prominent on the search engines, and that would ensure good exposure for your business website too. But then, there are some unscrupulous webmasters who are using black hat SEO methods in the articles they submit to the directories, which is really quite a shame.

The search engines themselves have stepped in to try out some kind of monitoring for the article submitting process. This kind-of security measure to ensure that the submitted articles are genuine in their intentions is known as search engine penalties.

What are Search Engine Penalties for Marketing Articles?

Search engine penalties are restrictions imposed on articles that are put on submissions. These restrictions are on the articles themselves, but they could also extend to the websites that they point to. When search engines penalize a particular website, the website will be abolished from their further searches. In that case, however good the website may be, or however keyword-rich, the search engines will just omit it from their searches. When such a limitation is in use, we say that the website has a search engine penalty.

Search engine penalties are very serious. They can damage the prospects of the website. If the search engines were to ban your website from their search results, you can well imagine the reduction in the number of people that will be able to visit there. And that could plummet your business prospects to the lowest possible depths.

Why do Search Engines Penalize Websites?

This is an important question asked by many article submitters, especially whose websites have been given SEO penalties. They question the authority of the search engines to impose a penalty on their websites. It is important to understand why search engines take the initiative in penalizing websites, and not any other Internet regulating body, because that will help us know how to avoid these penalties.

Here, we must remember that the search engines penalize websites not because they want to flaunt their authority over the machinations of the Internet, but simply because they want to make their own work lighter. Search engines always strive to display the best search results to the laypeople that search for information on the Internet. Search result loading time is an important issue. If the search engines were to search the entire body of the Internet, the time taken could be mindboggling. Hence, these search engines weed out the websites that have content duplicated from elsewhere, so that they do not repeat information in the results they display. They ban such duplicated websites from their future searches. That is what constitutes a search engine penalty actually.

The following is a good resource to read more about SEO and penalties imposed by the search engines:

http://www.ebyro.com/articles/seo/1/1/

Avoiding SEO Penalties on Your Marketing Articles

Here are some valuable tips on how you can avoid SEO penalties on your marketing articles, and hence on the website you have provided as a link.

Do not plagiarize content from anywhere. You can read several articles for your information, but when you write, write original. Copying and pasting from other websites will only attract a fat SEO penalty.

Once you have found good content on some websites, you can use it for your marketing article, but you must not use it as it is. You can change the sentence structure, or you can use synonyms for some words. Also, try to alter the sequence of the ideas expressed in the original content. You can read about writing original articles for submissions at:

http://www.ebyro.com/articles/article-marketing/24/1/.

If you are submitting articles to different directories, you do not attract SEO penalties. But it would be a good idea to alter your articles a bit before submitting. This is just a safety precaution.

Finally, before submitting your article, you must be sure to check it for any inadvertent copy that might have crept up in it. CopyScape is a good tool to do that. If you find anything copied, be sure to change those portions, run a CopyScape check again, and then submit the articles.