Should you Build links to your Article Directory Articles?
January 18th, 2010 | 62 comments
This is a question I received today from a customer of my Article Marketing Ebook and a question I’ve been receiving on a weekly basis for years. Amazingly enough, I believe this is the first time I’ve answered the question publicly, other than maybe in a few post comments here and there.
The answer to the question is 98% of the time, no. And 2% of the time, yes.
Many people believe that if they build links to the articles that they’ve submitted to article directories, those articles will then receive more authority, causing them to rank higher and drive even more traffic and authority to their site pages. This is true, but it only makes sense to do that about 2% of the time.
To understand why, you need to understand why Article Marketing is worth our time in the first place. The article directories already possess authority, so by submitting articles to them we are able to leverage that authority into traffic and also into incoming authority into our site pages.
If they didn’t possess authority, and you had to build the authority in order for them to drive traffic, they would be completely useless, because if that were the case we would just post the articles to our own site and promote that instead of promoting someone elses site.
So, any authority that we build to any one of our articles in an article directory is authority that we could have built to our own pages. With that being said, if your articles aren’t ranking for the keywords you’re targeting, it isn’t an authority problem, it’s a keyword research problem!!
Article Marketing isn’t meant to get your articles ranked for highly competitive phrases. It’s meant to get your articles ranked for long-tail phrases and if you’re doing good keyword research your articles are going to rank highly for those long-tail phrases without the help of your own link building efforts!
The argument could be made that if an article is ranked at #3 (for example) and that articles is driving traffic to your site, then why not do a little link-building and boost it to #1 for more traffic. That’s a legitimate argument BUT 98% of the time, when targeting long-tail phrases, the difference between the #3, 4, 5, 6 or even 7,8 and 9 spot and the #1 spot isn’t very large. When dealing with highly-competitive, popular phrases the difference can be huge, but with long-tail phrases it’s usually not. And even when it is, you have remember that this isn’t traffic to your site! The article still has to convert that traffic to your site!
Every once in a while though, I’ll hit a long-tail phrase that drives ALOT of traffic to my site without that article even being in the top 3 in the SERPS. This is very rare, happens about 2% of the time, but when it does happen I start building link to that article to get that #1 spot for even more traffic.
So, any time and/or money spent on building links to an article is usually better spent on building links to your own site.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject. Do you build links to your articles? If so, what is your reasoning and how do you justify the time investment?
-edit- Here are a few good points brought up in the comment field below:
Brian says: “Let me ask you this though. If you wanted an article to rank for a more competitive term, not so much long tail, wouldn’t it be easier to get an article on EZA ranked on the first page rather than trying to get a page on your own site ranked on the first page? I believe with some link building to the article that is on EZA, it can rank pretty easy for a more competitive term with some link building to your article. Just my 2 cents.”
MY ANSWER: Yes, it would be easier. But don’t forget, you’re only going to get about 10% of that traffic, at best (usually not even 10%) So you’re sacrificing 90% or more of the traffic.
Andy Beard says: “I am one of the world’s laziest linkbuilders but I really can’t see a problem taking an articlesnatch.com author feed and submitting it to Feedage or maybe a web2.0 site that can take a feed. Content gets buried on large article sites and you want to ensure it remains in the primary index.”
MY REPLY: Good point. Nothing wrong with that at all. My point is time. Doing any kind of automated link building that’s effective and takes very little time certainly isn’t a bad idea. It’s just not worth it if you’re going to spend much time at all doing so.
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18th January, 2010 at 6:19 pm
Hmmm…I always wonder about this issue. I will admit that I never take the time to build backlinks to my articles — but I would have said it was a good idea before I read your post.
I completely agree that the DOMAIN authority is what makes article marketing work (just as you have stated). But G puts a lot of emphasis on page authority (backlinks to a page). In fact, I think that an optimized page with lots of backlinks with good anchor text on a weak domain will easily outrank the same page with no backlinks on a strong domain.
That’s what I think — but I have never tested this either. Maybe we should do that. We should find an article that is not ranking and pound it with links from 1WL and see if we can move it up.
Just a thought…..thanks for the great article.
18th January, 2010 at 6:38 pm
I totally agree, why bother building links to an article instead of your own site?
If article marketing is in your focus, then yes, I can agree that building a few links to the article to boost it a little might help, but if you post articles only because you want that backlink or 2, it’s definitely not worth to be link built for.
18th January, 2010 at 9:30 pm
Hey Mark, I don’t buy the whole “domain” authority and “page” authority thing. Authority is authority. Articles on ezinearticles rank well because the entire site posses a great deal of authority and that authority leaks down into those article pages. A although I don’t have any links pointing to any articles/videos, I know I’ve heard Matt Cutts say the same thing in the past. If there were a page on Wikipedia that wasn’t linked to by any other page on wikipedia it would have absolutely no authority (for example.)
19th January, 2010 at 6:41 am
>> Article Marketing isn’t meant to get your articles ranked for highly competitive phrases. It’s meant to get your articles ranked for long-tail phrases and if you’re doing good keyword research your articles are going to rank highly for those long-tail phrases without the help of your own link building efforts!
Oops! No wonder my article marketing had been so “hit or miss”. I had always targeted the exact same keywords as my niche sites. So if I get you right, my niche sites should target “long tail 1″, …, “long tail n”; then my articles should target “very long tail 1a”, “very long tail 1b”, …, “very long tail na”, …, “very long tail nn”?
>> you have remember that this isn’t traffic to your site! The article still has to convert that traffic to your site!
Even worse is that your article could get dropped by the article directory, e.g. when a competitor flags it for some issue or other. One of my EZA articles was hit by this – it was about litter training, and was flagged for using obscene words like “shit” and “piss”.
>> Every once in a while though, I’ll hit a long-tail phrase that drives ALOT of traffic to my site without that article even being in the top 3 in the SERPS. This is very rare, happens about 2% of the time, but when it does happen I start building link to that article to get that #1 spot for even more traffic.
This rule makes a lot of sense. I used to build links to selected articles, but I had stopped some time ago. The links I built seemed to raise the position of my targeted article a little, at least initially. But the rankings always dropped eventually. From what you have written, I suspect that one reason is because the articles were not long tail enough.
19th January, 2010 at 7:43 am
Hi
I agree that it should only be done in exceptional circumstances. All link building efforts should concentrate on building links to pages that you own. A change in the ownership/policy of an article directory could throw away a lot of hard work.
19th January, 2010 at 8:54 am
I do not know but it does not make sense. That is not the way it should be.
That means having an article on EZA would have more authority than if I just post it on my site.
If it is so search engines need to improve. It leads a lot of scope on manipulation.
19th January, 2010 at 2:41 pm
I tend to agree with Mark Mason’s comments. Each page has it’s own individual pagerank. Yes, some of it will definitely flow from the main domain, but in the end the page has to stand on the strength of it’s own backlinks.
However I agree that spending time on building backlinks to your articles should only be done with a specific goal in mind and if it is worth the time.
As Mark suggested, it may a good idea to run a test and see what holds good with Big G.
19th January, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Let me ask you this though. If you wanted an article to rank for a more competitive term, not so much long tail, wouldn’t it be easier to get an article on EZA ranked on the first page rather than trying to get a page on your own site ranked on the first page? I believe with some link building to the article that is on EZA, it can rank pretty easy for a more competitive term with some link building to your article. Just my 2 cents.
19th January, 2010 at 2:59 pm
@ Lloyd – That’s correct, agreed. And I’ve been marketing with articles for over 5 years now. Been there, done that
@ Brian – Yes, it would be easier. But don’t forget, you’re only going to get about 10% of that traffic, at best (usually not even 10%)
19th January, 2010 at 3:00 pm
I am one of the world’s laziest linkbuilders but I really can’t see a problem taking an articlesnatch.com author feed and submitting it to Feedage or maybe a web2.0 site that can take a feed.
Content gets buried on large article sites and you want to ensure it remains in the primary index.
19th January, 2010 at 3:05 pm
@ Andy – Good point. Nothing wrong with that at all. My point is time. Doing any kind of automated link building that’s effective and takes very little time certainly isn’t a bad idea. It’s just not worth it if you’re going to spend much time at all doing so.
19th January, 2010 at 3:06 pm
I appreciate any advice you can give me on article marketing. I think I’m ready to invest in the Automatic Article Submitter. It is so time consuming to submit to multiple sites. Do you recommend changing up an article before sending it to multiple sites? I have read that it is OK to do it that way, but I am not sure.
19th January, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Josh, as usual, this was a very well thought out post and very helpful. It never made sense to me to do any kind of back linking to an article directory, but you have provided a more logical set of reasons not to.
I do like @AndyBeal’s idea of automating it though.
It’s been a while since I did any meaningful article marketing, but I’m cranking it up again. Beside being effective, I actually like doing it
19th January, 2010 at 3:27 pm
I too am thinking about an article submitter, but one that only submits to the top sites, not one of those spammy ones that submits to hundreds of sites. One that I just looked at is Article Submit Auto. It costs 37/month and I’m not sure if its going to be worth it or not. Anyone tried this yet and if so do you have any comments on it?
Thanks,
Brian
19th January, 2010 at 3:31 pm
I am focusing more on link building because I have so many sites that need some link love.
I was just wondering about this because I have heard so many different opinions. I just spent this morning creating some links to some of my Web 2.0 sites and EZA sites; although I have a program that builds them automatically while I work on other things.
19th January, 2010 at 3:34 pm
@Ken – If you’re only submitting to a handful of directories it’s not needed, but the more you submit to the most versions I recommend. With Automatic Article Submitter it’s easy, because it has a “spinner” built in.
@ Brian – Automatic Article Submitter is what I use. It is preloaded with alot of sites, but you can submit to only the ones you want to submit to. I definitely wouldn’t pay a monthly fee to use an article submitter!
19th January, 2010 at 3:40 pm
I agree with your point that bookmarking EZA articles, in most cases, will have only a small effect on the authority of the page. I agree with that statement. However, you continue to say that it is better to concentrate on promoting your own site. This is where the problem starts. If you only bookmark your own sites, you are spamming. You have to bookmark other content also. That is where bookmarking your articles comes in. Even a little extra traffic is better than randomly bookmarking sites, to prevent being labeled a spammer.
19th January, 2010 at 3:45 pm
Josh, thanks for the recommendation, I just checked it out and it definitely looks better and for the one time payment, it will definitely save me money. I like the built in spinner too. The other one didn’t have that.
Since you recommended it to me, if you want to provide me with an affiliate link, I would be happy to buy it through you. Someone might as well get the commission
Thanks,
Brian
19th January, 2010 at 3:52 pm
@ Brian – Thanks, take a look at the top right of my blog under “Josh’s Top Product Pick” click that banner and you’ll always get a discount. You’ll like it. Top-notch software.
19th January, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Great points Josh. I would agree that only a very small percentage of your articles would justify you spending linkbuilding time.
One question though. I do put articles on web 2.0 sites and link build those to pass link juice back to my new domains since you can’t send links too fast on new domains. So the thinking is that you can start aggressive link building without waiting for your new site to season by sending your link juice through an already seasoned web 2.0 site where more aggressive link velocity isn’t a problem.
Do you see a problem with that strategy?
19th January, 2010 at 4:10 pm
Thanks for an interesting post.
To be honest it had never really occurred to me to link to the articles, because I’d always assumed (correctly!) that they had more authority than my sites – but it was really interesting to read about when you might want to.
I’d be most grateful if someone could expand a little on Andy’s remark about an author feed, which is yet another thing I obviously need to learn about
19th January, 2010 at 4:42 pm
It sometimes takes a little browsing to find feeds and some feeds are better than others for links.
Here are Josh’s on Article Snatch
http://www.articlesnatch.com/myarticles/Josh-Spaulding/21441
If you then look up in the URL bar in your browser you can find the orange RSS icon which results in this RSS feed
http://www.articlesnatch.com/myrss/21441
The feed contains links to not only the articles, but also boosting links to the tag pages on Article Snatch, and unlike most article directories there is a full author profile including links back to their site.
19th January, 2010 at 4:43 pm
[...] Spaulding wrote a fantastic article about whether or not you should build backlinks to your article directory articles (let’s [...]
19th January, 2010 at 4:52 pm
As you can see from the above trackback I wrote a rebuttal to your article. I see how your method focuses on saving time but I think the conversion is a major factor (which you pointed out). I feel if you are going to spend any time focusing on a keyword (primary or longtail) you need to take the time to have the traffic go to your site over the article directory site.
Anyway, thanks for an engaging article! I enjoyed writing a rebuttal to it. ~Paul
19th January, 2010 at 5:29 pm
This article is true if you are driving traffic to your own site. But what about bum marketing? In that case link like crazy as your only concern is getting as many people as possible to the vendors offer. Serp position matters a little more when doing this.
19th January, 2010 at 6:26 pm
Good point. As for me, I rarely build links to my articles. I do it when I promote a specific product name sometimes, and I want to grab more than one spot on Google first page.
I do build link to web 20 pages as well,
but I prefer build links to my own properties.
Building links should be outsourced (for those who can), and diversified as well.
The real problem I see with beginners is that many of them think that building links is the holy grail. It’s only one part of the whole process.
How many people spend hours and hours building links and never make a sale? or just a couple of sales for their hard work?
Franck
19th January, 2010 at 6:41 pm
I tend to invest my time mostly on that 98% Josh has mentioned as I’ve seen that when you consistently, regularly and persistently write, publish and distribute articles, the results will eventually come through the search engines directly to your own site.
If time matters to you, which of course does, keep writing, publishing and distributing more frequently to see the results sooner. The bonus of this method is much closer to niche domination as “Others can make use of authority sites too, but they cannot make use of your site to get rankings for themselves!”
19th January, 2010 at 7:30 pm
One problem with building links to your articles is that you could end up being outranked by your own articles. That’s not good.
While I did not build links to it per se an article I recently wrote did in fact outrank the site it was linked to.
Mind you I can easily edit the article and even make it junk to keep it from competing directly against my site but still…it can happen.
Why bother building links to an article when it would be much more efficient and worthwhile to build links directly to one’s site? Makes no sense to me.
Carlos
19th January, 2010 at 9:53 pm
Hi thanks a lot
I agree that it should only be done in exceptional circumstances. All link building efforts should concentrate on building links to pages that you own. A change in the ownership/policy of an article directory could throw away a lot of hard work.
19th January, 2010 at 10:50 pm
I’ve often wondered about this Josh but never really had time to concentrate on link building to articles anyways. Good to know about the scenario when it would make sense to do so. Thanks.
19th January, 2010 at 11:28 pm
Hi Josh,
I’m wondering what your thoughts and strategy are regarding articles on your own blog. Do you place articles you write on your own blogs for the new content value, as well as submit them to directories? Or do you simply write different article for different purposes?
Ray
20th January, 2010 at 3:01 am
Josh,
Since we’re on the topic of article marketing vs website content, at the end of the month/year, are your websites pulling in more search engine traffic or article traffic?
I guess I’m debating whether to just create a 50-100 page website and not do article marketing, or create a 5-10 page website and do lots of article marketing.
Any thoughts on this?
20th January, 2010 at 3:03 am
This is my concern also. I write for my blog everyday, but I have also submitted some of my formal blog entires to Ezine articles. Will this hurt my content on my blog. I want my blog to be the original source of the content. Not ezine articles.
20th January, 2010 at 3:09 am
I’ve been doing link building to my articles on a very limited basis. In some cases, I’ve actually built links to my articles on Ezinearticles or Buzzle using other article sites.
I figure the article page has my link on it. The more link juice I can pass to that page, the more that flows out to my site using my targeted keyword.
Stompernet taught a strategy like this that is sometimes referred to as a link wheel. You basically put your content on top article sites and other web 2.0 sites. You interlink all the sites together randomly and include a single link from each site back to your money site.
The goal is to dominate the entire first page with content that includes or leads back to your site.
I should probably mention you need a unique article for each site and it takes a lot of time.
I just found a site that offers this link wheel service. I just placed an order. I’ve never used them before, but I’ll let you know if it works out. If so, it’ll be a massive time saver.
http://www.linkwheel.net/
20th January, 2010 at 3:38 am
@Don’t Be Broke:
I used to submit all the content of my blog posts (not my current blog) to EZA with the links back to my old blog. At one point of time, it ended up with none of my blog posts showing up in Google at all, only the EZA versions. Eventually, my blog completely dropped from the index, although it still received traffic from EZA and Bing. After I managed to build a few links from elsewhere and added a few more unique articles NOT sent to EZA, I managed to get it back into the index.
This, however, is MY experience. There was someone else who told me that he submitted his blog posts to EZA, and the EZA submissions initially outranked his original blog posts, but eventually his blog posts ended up on top of the SERPs.
At one point of time, I remember hearing that Google is supposed to be able to tell which is the original source of the article by both the timestamp and the link back to the original article from the syndicated versions (i.e. the blog post submitted to the article directory should link back to the original post on your blog). Unfortunately, my personal experience is that this is NOT true.
20th January, 2010 at 5:24 am
This is something I’ve thought about but it ended there. What does drive me crazy is writing an article and watching it rank higher than your webpage. Lost is traffic direct to your website- instead that traffic flows from the search engine to your article and then to your website.
Has this happened to anyone else?
20th January, 2010 at 8:42 am
Hi Josh,
Nice article once again.
I’ve never thought of building links to my articles in the article directories before, and the reason for that is precisely what you’ve shared above – I would rather build links to my own property, and also because I only submit articles to high authority article directories, so they already have a lot of links going to them.
Keep more coming Josh!
Welly Mulia
20th January, 2010 at 9:11 am
One question Josh.
You said:
“But don’t forget, you’re only going to get about 10% of that traffic, at best (usually not even 10%) So you’re sacrificing 90% or more of the traffic.”
Do you mean 10% is a REALLY GOOD author resource CTR?
Thanks,
Welly
20th January, 2010 at 10:01 am
Josh is 100% right on this one and if an article directory’s internal linking is so bad that it can’t pass on authority within itself then just pass by – it’s not worth the effort of submission.
20th January, 2010 at 10:51 am
Chris, you will then have to pass by all article directories.
Even Ezine Articles with a ton of authority only has 5-10% of its pages in Google’s primary index.
The question is whether you want your articles to be within that 5-10%
20th January, 2010 at 4:17 pm
Andy, no way am I going to argue with you (your blog is always must-read excellent) but I’ve got quite a number of blogs with 5K to 10K pages where the rate of indexing is easily over 90%, and that’s with autofed content. The big improvement for me was using YARPP (or similar) to improve internal linking (in fact the googlebot goes ape when presented with a YARPP enabled site of any size).
You quote a 5%-10% indexing rate for EZA. Well, a site: search shows currently 11,200,000 entries in Google for EZA. Even if we only took half of that (allowing for categories, author bios etc.) that’s way more than 5%-10% of the articles in there.
In fact because EZA does such an excellent job of internal linking I’d expect a very high percentage of indexed pages. How many rank within the first 1000 for any Google search (so primary not supplementalled) is another matter but then we come back to Josh’s initial point – why spend time helping article directories to rank for a specific keyphrase when the time would be better spent doing the same work on our own web properties.
In all my tests I’ve found only a handful of article directories that send any appreciable quantity of clickthru traffic and that’s more related to how you rate within the directories themselves (number of views from internal searches etc). than external backlinks to those pages affecting the external SERPs results. The rest of the directories are just backlink fodder anyway and if I was really looking to linkboost an outside site carrying my work I’d be looking closer at Squidoo, HubPages and docstoc, say, than EZA and the other conventional directories.
20th January, 2010 at 4:20 pm
@ Chris – I believe Andy said “primary” index
20th January, 2010 at 4:41 pm
Yep, the site:ezinearticles.com/* search gives 921,000 results so point taken, but overall the point is still valid concerning those sites you would bother putting the extra effort into if you’re looking to increase actual clickthrus.
20th January, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Hmmmm. I guess that makes sense – for most article directories. Obviously adding a link pointing to an article at EZA is like pouring a thimble of water into a lake. However, a lot of smaller article directories don’t have as much built in authority, right?
20th January, 2010 at 11:00 pm
Josh what do you mean by only get 10% of the traffic in response to the statement?
Do you mean overall, not everyone is going to click on your article, and then not everyone is going to read it and click-through? Thus saying on estimate only 10% really ever go to your site?
Or something along those lines.
Jay.
21st January, 2010 at 4:39 pm
also with feeds from on articlesnatch.com for the authors include links that you include in the resource box. so if you syndicate your authors feed, you are building links not only for the articles which link back to your site, but also to your sites as well.
While the keyword based and the category based feeds are linked directly to the articles.
21st January, 2010 at 7:27 pm
10% conversion? I would really enjoy that
But I think that we should really take advantage of the authority of EZA by getting as many backlinks as possible.
21st January, 2010 at 9:25 pm
I just read Mark’s first comment. I also think that when the search comes up with two pages from the directory and your article is not one of them then a link might make your article outrank one of the other articles showing in the Google search.
I think it also depends on the purpose of your article. Some articles are designed to send people to your website others are just to get links. If you have a very good converting article then link to it and get more traffic where you want it. I have some articles that over 25% of the people that read the article go to my website. Those would be great articles to throw a link or two toward.
Rick
22nd January, 2010 at 6:45 am
I agree with you Josh that most of the time you want to spend your time building backlinks that go to YOUR site directly. I want to get all of the pie, not part of it which is what will happen if I only get 10% of the traffic from an article
22nd January, 2010 at 2:14 pm
To link to my articles or not? has been a question I have been thinking about for a while now and although I have done it occassionally I’m glad to see that you agree with my conclusion that spending time building links to my own site is a more beneficial use of my time than building links to an article on another site that I will not fully benefit from.
23rd January, 2010 at 7:31 am
Awesome article Josh. Just starting with article marketing I thought I would have to build backlinks but you really opened up my eyes. Thanks.
25th January, 2010 at 5:45 pm
It makes more sense to build backlinks to your ownsite rather than an article. You have one opportunity and you may lose them after an article due to time or lack of interest or boredom of reading – for any reason ie distraction etc.
Backlink building takes effort so be smart build to where you need people to be.
28th January, 2010 at 11:50 am
In my opinion the best article blasting software out there is the unique article wizard which also has a 3rd party product to write the article for you. COsts a bit in total but saves a lot of time and really works well to boost your 3 tail keywords into the top 10 quickly. I have neve rlinked to any articles as my website remains the my sole priority. Even if you did manage to get an article high up the ranking you still need to get the reader to click a link in your bio to get them to your site!
2nd February, 2010 at 5:56 pm
This is more about your recent email promoting Best Spinner. You’ve convinced me about the importance of using articles, and I bought Article Domination, but is it that important to submit different articles to directories. I’m sure Jon Leger himself did some research that showed it made little difference?
15th February, 2010 at 4:31 am
I run a niche membership site, and although I could rank my site for the terms. I want to drive traffic straight to a squeeze page.
Ranking a squeeze page for 10+ keywords is rather tedious and to get around it I’m just piggy backing off the success of EZA and trying to increase my click through rate.
I will build a blog soon and build a list through it. What I am doing right now is getting it going.
Jay.
16th February, 2010 at 3:44 pm
This IS a very interesting topic, as I’ve gone back and forth on the subject a bit.
I would add this caveat.
For the beginner, with a brand new site, they WILL get quicker results with building links to their articles.
However, this shouldn’t be done exclusively and one must focus most of your effort on link building to your own site.
Over time, you will get more results sending traffic to your own site, but more immediate results piggy backing on a site like EZA
22nd February, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Once again…thank you Josh! I came to the blog looking for this exact info. You are one of only two internet marketers that I really follow any more so this was a great find for me!
I am new to SEO and article marketing and have been doing an experiment w/ link building to an article. After a few days of watching it bounce on and off the first page of Google, I came to the realization that my time was not being wisely spent! Most of my traffic from the articles and all my opt-ins came in the first 24 hours of submitting the article to ezinearticles. Despite my work and successfully moving the article up in it’s Google ranking, it didn’t necessarily drive any more traffic and I got no new opt-ins.
Clearly, all the time spend link building for the article would have been better spent on my own site! This is the exact info and explanation I was looking for to better organize my strategy from this point forward!
6th March, 2010 at 8:55 pm
Hi Josh,
I agree with you and IMHO it’s just doesn’t make sense to build links to a site that already has a million links running to it.
Especially when you consider the fact that 80% of the traffic will probably click on all the adsense.
I’d rather spend the time methodically building all the backlinks I can to my own sites.
13th April, 2010 at 12:28 pm
I’ve been trying to build links to boost my Bukisa articles, because I get money per visit, whilst no one ever seems to click adverts on my blogsite (Google PR3) so I never get money from them.
A query – nothing to do with the article – howcome some of your comment links are dofollow and some nofollow?. There doesn’t seem to be any logical reasoning to it – even your own replies vary with dofollow and nofollow….
13th April, 2010 at 1:33 pm
Write – Reading my comment policy would be the route to clarity in that matter, wouldn’t you think?
16th June, 2010 at 10:58 pm
Maybe for some types of websites, there is a concern with outranking yourself by promoting submitted articles, but not for all sites. Plus if you’re careful to select the same category, but write something a little different than what you’re specifically promoting, you’ll be okay.
When you consider that if you spend 10 minutes getting 5-10 links pointing to each submitted article to a high authority site, then each individual article page becomes a pr2-pr5 within a few months, some of that link juice is going to rain down on your site.
I realize that anyone who is the least bit savvy about PR knows it’s not more important than key worded backlinks, but when you posess a higher pr site, you simply don’t need as many because you have more juice to push other sites aside. That’s how fat sites move you aside even though they don’t have your exact key words. They have big pr numbers. Once you have a higher pr, you can also target other key words with greater ease, which is what we all want. Then rinse and repeat.
I personally think pointing dofollow links to submitted articles helps 100% of the time. Just be sure you download the nofollow add-on by Firefox, so you can spot nofollow sites instantly. Nofollows, like Digg, don’t give juice to pr thirsty webmasters and are a waste of your precious time.
25th August, 2010 at 7:52 pm
Josh,
I have been reading some of your material for awhile now and it is top notch! I do mostly consulting now, but I got my start with affiliate marketing and clickbank.
Anyways, my point is that I am now venturing in CPA, because I feel there is a real opportunity in this field. I have a lot of experience with article marketing (over 1,000 articles on ezine) but I am now focusing my efforts on working smarter and not harder.
ezinearticles.com obviously carries a tremendous amount of weight, and I have seen ezinearticles on the first page of google for some competitive phrases.
I read your above post and think it is great, but if I do some thorough research with SEOquake and determine that I can rank (I think) on the first page of Google with 20-30 backlinks to an ezinearticle, don’t you think that is a good strategy?