Michiel Van Kets of manual-submissions.com brought up some critical points regarding my last post. While I don’t agree with everything he said, he did make a good point about WHY submission services link back to the original article. They’re trying to tell Google that they had it first. They’re trying to protect against duplicate content penalization and claim first use of the article. Since ideamarketers.com is the longest running article directory on the Web (Dec 1998) and it does receive several million page views per month, it is considered a high authority site and usually brings up higher search results. So, I can understand their concern.

Yet it still doesn’t give the end user a good experience to be led away to a duplicate copy of an article for more information, nor does it best serve the writer who isn’t able to “strike while the iron is hot.”

SO… I came up with a solution.  (Criticism is the mother of invention.) I’ve programmed our site to recognize if the “more information” url is a link to a major submission service. If it is, it will link to the default URL on the writer profile for more information and then at the bottom of the article, it will say, “This article was submitted by a submission service.” That phrase will then link to the duplicate copy on the submission service’s site.

This should satisfy the submission service, the author, the end user, and Google. If you use a submission service that links back to a copy of the article on their site, you’re welcome to comment below with the name of that service and I’ll add it to the programming so it will be handled appropriately.

I might add, that many times the default URL on your writer profile will NOT be the URL you want to link an article to. In this case, ideally you’d put a specific URL within your site in the blank we provide in the article-level custom resource box.

If you own or work for a submission service, you’d be better off letting the writer have their specific URL in the custom resource box and hard-code a link (using html) to your original copy at the bottom of the body of the article. This way you’d be covering your own interests and those of your customers.