This is undoubtedly probably the most asked question regarding article submission on the Internet. So is an answer available?

Well the actual answer is not really as simple as a yes/no, as it can may actually both, and yet it can also be neither! 'What?' I hear you ask!

There are basically two ways of submitting articles on the internet, the incorrect way, which may result in Google giving you a few minus points, and the correct way which means quite a few extra bonus Google points. While they keep fiddling about with the algorithms concerning Pagerank and search results, the important thing that does continue is that you have enough back links to your website, preferably one-way.

Gone now are the days when any old links would do to help towards a Google Pagerank. Due to a changes sometime around 2007, the only links likely to help you receive much higher search placing and Pagerank are web sites which have a Pagerank of FOUR or greater. So those of you, who have spent the last few years building up any kind of links to your web sites, have now just discovered that Google is no longer interested. Actually this is not all bad news though, as they will still help with Lycos, Yahoo, etc. So do not stop doing them completely, but it is best to concentrate on those with a 4+ Pagerank.

One main thing that the majority of people tend to forget when submitting an article is that Google will actually ignore duplicates. This does not mean you are penalised for duplicates, you are not, but they will only list one. So if you submit your article to a Pagerank 2, and a Pagerank 4 free submission site, and they are completely the same, if Google picks up the first submitted one, you will only get the Pagerank 2 pointing to you from Google, as I mentioned earlier, this is pretty worthless now. So always submit to the highest PR site, and wait until it is indexed.

The best way of ensuring every submission to different article directories actually count as helping you with your own Pagerank is to modify the text in each of your articles for each submission. This can be as simple as just changing a number of synonyms or you can go as far as rearranging paragraphs, but you are looking to change at least 30% these days per article. A mixture of a few things is generally best method, as just changing the odd word will not work. This can be a rather laborious thing to do manually; luckily software is around to help you. One of the best and it is free is DupeProFree.

So by submitting all your articles to Pagerank 4+ sites only, and making changes to a reasonable number of words, while keeping the same context, each submission should count in some way towards your Pagerank.

One last thing about article submissions is that by submitting masses of articles to the same website, will not aid much with your Pagerank, as only one link will count on Google, while the others will only get a little juice.. However, the pay-off this for your website is that it is more likely to benefit from those articles being republished across other web sites, and a small number of these articles will be from sites with a decent ranking. So it is all a case of what you are looking for, links or Pagerank juice.

Always make sure your articles are of decent quality, otherwise they will not be read, you will gain no clicks, no one will republish them, and one day Google may do you for bad grammar!

One of the highest and most respected article site is EzineArticles and I strongly recommend this is the first site you use to get indexed, then submit to other smaller article sites like SearchnFindArticles just for the exposure. If I am just after links and spreading content around the web, I can submit to over 500 article sites, but I only do this once I have one indexed on a high PR site.

This is not an exact art, but keep the above in mind when looking to get visitors to your site, and to get it moving up the search engine rankings.