You’ve probably seen or heard SEOs talking about the benefits of writing dozens (or hundreds) of articles & placing them around the web on sites like ezinearticles & buzzle.com – is it worth the time & effort?

The answer appears to be – it depends on what you want out of it.

If you’re shooting for backlinks, then probably not. But if Reputation Management is a prime focus, then just a few well placed (& well crafted) articles could work wonders.

One of the more controversial ways to use an article directory is for reputation management. This approach allows you to use the domain trust, internal anchor text and on page SEO factors of the directory to your advantage. The likelyhood of an article directory outranking your main domain for your company name is fairly small. However, in many cases it does have the potential to outrank most user-generated content or review-based websites that might be ranking for your name. A carefully crafted title, combined with a few targeted links from your official website can carry a lot of weight, and usually displace negative listings.

Read more at Search Engine Land