This Friday’s SEO Q&A question comes from a website owner who is looking to build backlinks to his site via article distribution. SEO Q&A is a new series in Search Engine Journal where we pose a reader’s question to our blog readers, and ask you readers to contribute your thoughts on the matter in our comments below (don’t forget to link back to your company). Thanks!
My question is about using articles as a way of getting backlinks. Is there any type of penalty for submitting too many articles at one time?
I have about thirty articles (on different topics concerning car insurance)I want to submit to top article directories. Will google give me some sort of penalty when these articles generate backlinks to my site, because I know your suppose to build links slowly.
Comments
11 responses so far ↓
Cristian Mezei on Jul 20, 2007 at 9:32 am
Off course there are filters. But seeing how many articles you have (30) you should not have a problem with freqvency, simply because they are too few.
If you could take an best practice example, take this one:
A website should not gain links in an unnatural way. Try to “emulate” a natural growth.
Whenever you put a new website online, don’t put it with 50.000 pages. Start low, grow in time.
Whenever you put a new website online, don’d add 50.000 links towards it in the first week. Grow the links naturally.
I think a 10 links / week ratio is usually perfect.
If a website is already old (let’s sau 2-3 year old domain), and already has 50.000 backlinks, there should be no problem if you would aquire 10.000 more in the next month. But for a new website …. try to keep it low-level.
There’s always a nice bonus added to the the “low-level” tehnique. You can (90% sure) bypass the sandbox.
That means that if you add 10.000 links towards your website, in the first day of existance, you will most definitely end up in the sandbox. If you add 1 link per 2-3 days (and 1 link from one page, not 1 site-wide link), that will do you far more good then the other 10.000.
Have fun.
Rhea Drysdale on Jul 20, 2007 at 10:14 am
Ditto what Cristian said.
The goal is natural growth through a variety of sources. If the content of the articles is compelling just leak a couple a week in targeted areas and see what happens. Google won’t penalize normal business practices unless you’re beating them over the head. If you notice a problem, scale back or determine if your articles are ending up in red flag sites.
Alan Rabinowitz on Jul 20, 2007 at 10:52 am
Articles fade in power. They start at a top level and then fade as they are archived deeper into a site.
Many marketers utilize them as they believe that articles are a whit-hat method of SEO.
Articles are good, but if you are using articles solely for the purpose of increasing Link Popularity then you are “technically” spamming — so there is a fine line between content for traffic and content for spam. Reducing numbers is smarter anyway as over time article links fade in the power they pass so spreading syndications would be wiser and limit the spam potential.
If you are a “Proactive Marketer” you will get links from other methods and not limit it to articles. Articles are NOT the only white-hat method of SEO.
Try asking for a link. Although in this day and age, everyone wants something for something, there are still times that simply asking works. If there is good buzz-worthy content on your own site, then its more likely you will get a link. Sometimes you just need to start the promotion off on your end to get that traffic.
But as for numbers, SEO is not a numbers game, so simply do what really makes sense from a marketers perspective and decide if its better to even put that much content on your own website. If these articles are really that good, then why wouldn’t you want to increase the quality content on your own site?
Cristian Mezei on Jul 20, 2007 at 11:40 am
So what ? You want trust from the search engines, not a PR8.
A link from a page, from a website, is the same no matter where from. Unless pagerank is what you are after. And you shouldn’t be after that.
Gideon on Jul 20, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Great SEO advice from Cristian - spot on.
Alan Rabinowitz on Jul 20, 2007 at 2:09 pm
I thought my entire post made the point about the goals and told it like it is.
You’re also talking about “trust” when someone states they want to syndicate 30 articles for the sole purpose of increasing backlinks? Doesn’t this make the use of articles fall into a gray area? Don’t you think Google sees this daily and treats article sites respectively? How much trust can one really gain unless the links are really natural?
:)
Cristian Mezei on Jul 20, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Alan, no offense, but you’re way back beside the point here.
Trust from the search engines, can be gained no matter what the webmaster’s goal is (natural, tricky, black-hat, whitehat, greyhat etc.).
Irrelevant. They are a news aggregation service, which ocasionally offers a backlink too. They will never be “flagged” by Google unless the webmaster of that Article Directory employes blackhat tactics, or spams.
Let me tell you something: 90% of the links of all the websites that get SEO in this world, are not natural. Go figure why they have trust.
Salman Siddiqui on Jul 20, 2007 at 9:46 pm
But natural way of earning backlinks is too slow. Because many times your content is good and people use it but do not link back…spam blogs..!
Christian said that one should not be running for PR. Isnt it so that backlink from a PR8 matters more than from PR4?
Could someone explian that? Why not run for PRs
Nathan on Jul 23, 2007 at 3:29 am
Salman,
people all seam to belive that a PR 10 site will list for anything it wants to, and a PR 0 site cant. There is a reason why google only exports the green bar pagerank every 3-4 months and that is so we do not become obsessed with the page rank and just aim to gain pagerank.
Page rank is only a measure of how many links are going to a website(as well as there strength), Google also uses the relevancy of a link to see if it is worthwhile for the search terms. For example, if you look at this particular web page, a link would be useful if you are a Internet marketing agency, as the majority of links to it are relating to the industy, however if your website was regarding your local tanning salon in mississippi then the link would not be relevant.
It would however still pass on page rank
Cristian Mezei on Jul 23, 2007 at 5:04 am
I totally agree with Nathan.
What anyone should be interested, is TrustRank, not PageRank.
We, some of the older guys know what that is, how to spot it (because there’s no tool, and even no documentation whatsoever, to see a scale of it for a certain website), but usual clients that have a business certainly can’t know what that is.
My 100% advice is this : Aside from what Nathan said (you want to have a link from related websites) , whenever you search for a new link opportunity, figure out what page you want your link on, then try to see what the page’s meta tags are, and what the title is, and if that page shows up in the first 2 pages for the most important keyword / key phrase of that page, then that’s the best page your link should be on, even if the page is a PR0 …
Yes, trust me … A PR1 link from a PR1 page can help you more then a PR6 link.
James on Jul 24, 2007 at 7:32 pm
PageRank for some reason has become the Holy Grail that so many people are chasing. The fact of the matter is that PR simply doesn’t mean what it once did. Instead of obsessing over your PR - web site owners should focus on providing unique content and garnering QUALITY back links.
If you have written 30 articles that actually offer the end user something they are searching for then you have done your job. If you are just pushing out articles solely for the benefit of PR you will be sorely disappointed the next time there is an update. You may go from a PR 2 to a PR 4 but you will most likely notice you haven’t made actual gains on your key phrase returns. And that is really where you want to climb the ladder, would you rather have PR 2 and appear on the 1st page or a PR 4 and be buried on page 13?
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