Article submission web-sites and SEO

[ditoroin]

Does article submission web-sites have any impact to SEO in these days?

There are a lot of good/not so good article submission databases, but does it really matter if you spend a time to write unique articles for them?

I mean, is it a good way for link-building, or should I spend more time for other parts of SEO?

There are also a special websites (for example SubmitYourArticle) which automate this process, does it make sense to use this services?

Alternates?

Lots of questions…

Update Sorry, I found some good answers only after that I posted this question.

[ditoroin]

It seems that there are really good answers already in the Q/A:

1. http://www.seomoz.org/q/has-anyone-use-this-source-to-submit-articles
2. http://www.seomoz.org/q/are-there-any-good-websites-to-submit-articles-to
3. http://www.seomoz.org/q/ezine-articles
4. http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-are-the-best-article-sites-to-submit-to
5. http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-it-safe-to-submit-the-same-article-to-multiple-sites
6. http://www.seomoz.org/q/do-links-to-blog-articles-help-that-much

And, the short answer is that you should avoid submitting articles in such directories. Sometimes it will even harm your site.

Also, I noticed that my article on Ezine is copied to a bunch of low-quality web-sites. Of course they removed my on-page links.

[ditoroin]

Thanks Branden,

This article is about Press Releases, which as I know has even less impact on SEO that article submission.

[zingseo]

Hi Dimitri,

Would you mind please posting a link to the other relevant answers?

Branden's answer was very interesting. I'm still a little skeptical as I client i recently picked up actually had a manual penalty for submitting articles to the likes of ezinearticles.com ... these were the examples of 'suspect links' that google gave us during the several rounds of reconsideration requests...

So, I'm pretty reluctant to recommend article marketing at the moment.

[Branden_S]

Yes they have an impact......less of an impact from years ago, but they still have an impact

Heres an article from a test ran on Matt cutts blog.  Somone published an article pointing to mattcutts.com.  Anchor text in the article was "Leasreepressmm"...  A few days later Matt's blog ranked for this keyword.  Proof that article submission still carries a little weight

http://searchengineland.com/matt-cutts-more-proof-google-does-count-links-from-press-releases-158350