SEO: The right and wrong way to get article links

[$5 submissions]

Interesting analysis of the write, spin, submit cycle of article-based backlink building


SOURCE: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/article-m...teboard-friday

First off, does Google really want to count those links? Is that what search engineers feel like are going to provide the best results? When I search for something in Google and they say, "Ah, well, you know what, looks like Rand's article on white cats are the best pets, that's been spun on 300 article sites, so he must be the very best resource in the whole world on that topic." Can you possibly imagine a Googler thinking that way? So, instead they're going to be writing algorithms to try and prevent this stuff from working. They do all the time. Some of them fall out of favor. You can see they'll sometimes publicly lose their PageRank, or they won't but they'll lose their ability to pass link juice, or the sites will be completely penalized and they won't rank anywhere in the top 5 or 10 results and your site won't rank anywhere. One day Google just wakes up, does an algorithm change. You wake up in the morning, and boom, all your rankings are gone. You're way down in the penalty box. You go, "What did I do wrong? I've been a good article spinner. How could they do this to me?"

Another big risk is the duplicate content side. If you've submitting any content that you'd actually like to rank for, it's going to be pretty tough because some of these article sites are going to claim it's their own. They're going to earn links to their site more than you're able to earn links to your site. You might be penalized and they stay unpenalized, meaning that they're going to essentially cannibalize the traffic that you could have earned. If you are writing anything really good, you should be wanting to put it on one of two sites - your own 90% of the time, or maybe 10% of the time on a guest posting on another blog, on another website, on a content site, that has great reach, great reputation, that's going to earn you some trust and authority, not just from the links you're going to get. That's not the goal. The goal is to get readership and trust over to your site from real people who enjoy that content.

Of course, the content itself. Most of the time when people are talking about doing article marketing or article spinning, they're talking about the worst quality, lowest junk crap. As you can see with updates like Panda and Big Daddy and Vince a little bit, Google is just getting so much smarter about content analysis, and they're able to determine what matters in a block of text and what actual people like. They use user and usage data to do this now. Trying to game that system with low quality junk is not going to get you very far.

Finally, the thing that I think people forget about the most is they'll spend weeks or months, hours and hours on end, trying to spin the right things and find the right directories and getting their articles submitted here and generating some junky crap over there. I think to myself, imagine, imagine if you were doing something authentic. Imagine if you were doing real high quality SEO and inbound marketing. Imagine if instead of doing that, you got 50 more Twitter followers that day and you shared a bunch of good stuff and you wrote one guest post that maybe only went to one site, but that link lasted for the next 10 years. Imagine what you've lost when you spend time doing this kind of crap.

BTW, If you want higher quality guest blog post backlinks, hit me up at [email protected] (mainstream)

[JamesGw]

I just want to note that there's no explicit duplicate content penalty. Google just prefers to not serve similar pieces of content near eachother in its SERPs. This goes without saying. That said, having more "authority" on your page (backlinks / optimization) will have you ranking higher than the other duplicate content.

Having your stuff duplicated on the web won't hurt you unless the duplicated content has stronger ranking factors. Now, having duplicate content among several pages on your own site will hurt you, but that's something else entirely.

Just wanted to clear that up.

[AdultKing]

Google doesn't penalize duplicate content, it often just ignores it. If your site is manually reviewed and found to be a farm of duplicate content then expect to disappear out of the SERPs entirely, or at best a supplementary index.

Original, quality content is the only medium to long term strategy that works.

[GonZo]

Originally Posted by AdultKing

Original, quality content is the only medium to long term strategy that works.

Pearl!!
Ooops wrong board.

[My Pimp]

Links from pages with the same topic are the best. For example pages about tits should link to websites about tits.

[Antonio]

If you really know what you are doing, you can get pretty much unlimited amount of content by spinning one original article. Write it, spin it by hand on word, sentence, and paragraph level with at least 20, well span titles, and make sure that your spans are 100% human readable. After that, you can submit it to article directories, linking to every single page of your site, submit it to Web 2.0 sites, submit it to WP blogs for contextual links, you name it. This gives you tons of links and there is no way Google is going to find out that this is span content, it’s mathematically impossible. You can have you span article ready in 5-6 hours or so and get thousands of links by posting it all over the map…. just my 2c.

[icymelon]

i have not found any adult article directories.

[digitalfantasies]

Originally Posted by JamesGw

I just want to note that there's no explicit duplicate content penalty. Google just prefers to not serve similar pieces of content near eachother in its SERPs. This goes without saying. That said, having more "authority" on your page (backlinks / optimization) will have you ranking higher than the other duplicate content.

Having your stuff duplicated on the web won't hurt you unless the duplicated content has stronger ranking factors. Now, having duplicate content among several pages on your own site will hurt you, but that's something else entirely.

Just wanted to clear that up.

So does the original writer of the content (text/article) also get credit for it in the serps? I mean: will the writer in general rank higher for content related searches than the copycats?? Or will a copycat rank higher with your text if he has better backlinks?

IMO the writer should obviously rank higher for his written content... just not sure if this is always the case...

[AdultKing]

Originally Posted by Antonio

If you really know what you are doing, you can get pretty much unlimited amount of content by spinning one original article. Write it, spin it by hand on word, sentence, and paragraph level with at least 20, well span titles, and make sure that your spans are 100% human readable. After that, you can submit it to article directories, linking to every single page of your site, submit it to Web 2.0 sites, submit it to WP blogs for contextual links, you name it. This gives you tons of links and there is no way Google is going to find out that this is span content, it?s mathematically impossible. You can have you span article ready in 5-6 hours or so and get thousands of links by posting it all over the map?. just my 2c.

Spinning articles is the last resort if the uncreative. At the very least, you need to have human rewriters. Do you not think that Google is rapidly approaching a level where it can semantically detect spun articles ? If you don't think Google is working with AI to approach the problem of junk then you're deluded.

[marlboroack]

It's all wrong

[digitaldivas]

Originally Posted by digitalfantasies

So does the original writer of the content (text/article) also get credit for it in the serps? I mean: will the writer in general rank higher for content related searches than the copycats?? Or will a copycat rank higher with your text if he has better backlinks?

IMO the writer should obviously rank higher for his written content... just not sure if this is always the case...

yes this is what I was thinking too.