Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Get found
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Article Marketing / Article Posting

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Article Marketing / Article Posting

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    3
    860
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • SEOWizards
      SEOWizards last edited by

      I am working on the SEO on a few different websites and I have built out an article marketing campaign so that I can get high quality backlinks for my website.

      I have been writing the content myself and I have been manually building out the top Web 2.0, Article Directory, and Doc Sharing sites.

      today I was creating an account on squidoo and I wondered if it mattered if I had the username be one of two things:

      1. my keyword as a user name, like: [keyword+geotag] example: roofinghouston

      2. just my first and last name as the username (or just a username I always use)

      (The reason behind #1 would be to have the optimized keyword and location I am trying to rank for, inside of the username. The reason for #2 would be that I don't want to get into trouble by having "too much" optimization.)

      I know a bit about optimization and that getting your keyword out there is great in a lot of areas, but I am not sure if it looks "suspicious" if I have my username be the keyword+geotag.

      I am just worried that all of this hard work will be torn down if I look like I'm trying too hard to be optimized, etc etc.

      There is no one answer, I am mainly looking for shared experiences.

      If you do have a definite answer, then I would like that too 🙂

      Thanks SEOMoz!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Textbroker
        Textbroker last edited by

        Unfortunately, article directories didn't carry much link juice to begin with, and as Francisco said, Panda and Penguin have pretty much negated them as SEO tactics entirely. You might want to look at guest blogging, but make sure your articles are really something your readers will enjoy.

        Good luck!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Francisco_Meza
          Francisco_Meza last edited by

          Hi Matthew,

          if you haven't heard of the Penguin update, you HAVE to learn about it. It was an algorithm change on April 24 2012 that hit sites like squidoo. Many people have abuse article marketing (spinning) to try and get more rankings.

          What I would recommend is to make some friends in your industry be using Followerwonk. Post on YOUR site and perhaps they can link to you. There are many blog posts on how to do this.

          Also i recommend you read chapter 7 http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • 1 / 1
          • First post
            Last post

          Got a burning SEO question?

          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


          Start my free trial


          Browse Questions

          Explore more categories

          • Moz Tools

            Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

          • SEO Tactics

            Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

          • Community

            Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

          • Digital Marketing

            Chat about tactics outside of SEO

          • Research & Trends

            Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

          • Support

            Connect on product support and feature requests.

          • See all categories

          Related Questions

          • McTaggart

            What does Disallow: /french-wines/?* actually do - robots.txt

            Hello Mozzers - Just wondering what this robots.txt instruction means: Disallow: /french-wines/?* Does it stop Googlebot crawling and indexing URLs in that "French Wines" folder - specifically the URLs that include a question mark? Would it stop the crawling of deeper folders - e.g. /french-wines/rhone-region/ that include a question mark in their URL? I think this has been done to block URLs containing query strings. Thanks, Luke

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
            0
          • tbps

            Help article / Knowledge base SEO consideration

            Hi everyone, I am in the process of building the knowledge base for our SaaS product and I am afraid it could impact us negatively on the SEO side because of: Thin content on pages containing short answers to specific questions Keyword cannibalisation between some of our blog articles and the knowledge base articles I didn't find much on the impact of knowledge bases on SEO when I searched on Google. So I'm hoping we can use this thread to share a few thoughts and best practices on this topic. Below is a bit more details on the issues I face, any tips on how to address them would be most welcome. 1. Thin content: Some articles will have thin content by design: the H1 will be a specific question and there will be only 2 or 3 lines of text answering it in the article. I think creating a dedicated article per question is better than grouping 20 questions on one article from a UX point of view, because this will enable us to direct users more quickly to the answer when they use the live search function inside the software (help widget) or on the knowledge base (saves them the need to scrolling a long article to find the answer). Now the issue is that this will result in lots of pages with thin content. A workaround could be to have both a detailed FAQ style page with all the questions and answers, and individual articles for each question on top of that. The FAQ style page could be indexed in Google while the individual articles would have either a noIndex directive or a rel canonical to the FAQ style page. Have any of you faced similar issues when setting-up your knowledge base? Which approach would you recommend? 2.Keyword cannibalisation: There will be, to some extend, a level of keyword cannibalisation between our blog articles (which rank well) and some of the knowledge base articles. While we want both types of articles to appear in search, we don't want the "How to do XYZ" blog article containing practical tips to compete with the "How to do XYZ in the software" knowledge base article. Do you have any advice on how to achieve that? Having a specific Schema.org (or equivalent) type of markup to differentiate between the 2 types of articles would have been ideal but I couldn't find anything relating to help articles specifically when I searched.

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tbps
            0
          • RobAus

            Question about Indexing of /?limit=all

            Hi, i've got your SEO Suite Ultimate installed on my site (www.customlogocases.com). I've got a relatively new magento site (around 1 year). We have recently been doing some pr/seo for the category pages, for example /custom-ipad-cases/ But when I search on google, it seems that google has indexed the /custom-ipad-cases/?limit=all This /?limit=all page is one without any links, and only has a PA of 1. Whereas the standard /custom-ipad-cases/ without the /? query has a much higher pa of 20, and a couple of links pointing towards it. So therefore I would want this particular page to be the one that google indexes. And along the same logic, this page really should be able to achieve higher rankings than the /?limit=all page. Is my thinking here correct? Should I disallow all the /? now, even though these are the ones that are indexed, and the others currently are not. I'd be happy to take the hit while it figures it out, because the higher PA pages are what I ultimately am getting links to... Thoughts?

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobAus
            0
          • blankslatedumbo

            Should I use **tags or h1/h2 tags for article titles on my homepage**

            I recently had an seo consultant recommend using tags instead of h1/h2 tags for article titles on the homepage of my news website and category landing pages. I've only seen this done a handful of times on news/editorial websites. For example: http://www.muscleandfitness.com/ Can anyone weigh in on this?

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blankslatedumbo
            0
          • EileenCleary

            Javascript onclick redirects / porn sites...

            We noticed around 7 websites which with domains that were just recently registered (with privacy protection). They are using our website keywords/titles and brand name and the sites are mostly porn / junk sites. They don't link to our website directly but use a javascript onclick redirect which is why we think we aren't seeing them in our backlinks report.  We've been in business for over 12 years and haven't come across sites like this before.  We recently lost our first page rankings for a few of our highest converting key phrases and have been digging in to possible causes. Just wondering if these sites could be impacting our results, and how to figure out if there are more like this? Examples: nesat.net
            flowmeterdirectory.biz
            finnsat.net
            dotsjobs.net

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary
            0
          • Mark_Ch

            Best Practice For Company/Client Logo Endorsement

            Article: http://searchengineland.com/homepage-sliders-are-bad-for-seo-usability-163496 I came across the following article and somewhat agree with the authors summary.
            I find sliders a distraction to B2B users and overall offers no SEO benefits. Scenario
            As a service provider, over time I have worked with many high profile blue chip comnpanies. As part of my site redesign, I'm looking to show users my client achievements. My initial thoughts are to carry out the following: On the home page I'm looking to incorporate some high profile company logos (similar to http://www.semrush.com) with a hyperlink "more customers" to the right of logo caption. The link will take the user to a dedicated page (www.mydomain.co.uk/customer) showing a comprehensive list of company logos. Questions
            #1 Is the above practice good or bad.
            #2 Is there a better way to achieve the above Any other practical advise on user experience, social engagement, website speed, etc would be much appreciated. Thanks Mark

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
            0
          • theLotter

            Should pages of old news articles be indexed?

            My website published about 3 news articles a day and is set up so that old news articles can be accessed through a "back" button with articles going to page 2 then page 3 then page 4, etc... as new articles push them down.  The pages include a link to the article and a short snippet. I was thinking I would want Google to index the first 3 pages of articles, but after that the pages are not worthwhile.  Could these pages harm me and should they be noindexed and/or added as a canonical URL to the main news page - or is leaving them as is fine because they are so deep into the site that Google won't see them, but I also won't be penalized for having week content? Thanks for the help!

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter
            0
          • BeTheBoss

            What do you do with outdated news and articles?

            What do you guys do with your old content/news/articles? Do you just leave them on your site forever for historical reasons? It goes without saying that you wouldn't delete an article that has links pointing to it. But if there aren't any links, it doesn't rank and it doesn't receive traffic… do you just scrap it? How say you? Update: I would also like to throw in that I have a client who in 2006/2007 used content from another site. What would you do with that content after this amount of time? Bother with it?

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss
            0

          Get started with Moz Pro!

          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

          Start my free trial
          Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz API
          • Moz Data
          • STAT
          • Product Updates
          Moz Solutions
          • SMB Solutions
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Digital Marketers
          Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Authority Checker
          • Link Explorer
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • Brand Authority Checker
          • Local Citation Checker
          • MozBar Extension
          • MozCast
          Resources
          • Blog
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Help Hub
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • How-to Guides
          • Moz Academy
          • API Docs
          About Moz
          • About
          • Team
          • Careers
          • Contact
          Why Moz
          • Case Studies
          • Testimonials
          Get Involved
          • Become an Affiliate
          • MozCon
          • Webinars
          • Practical Marketer Series
          • MozPod
          Connect with us

          Contact the Help team

          Join our newsletter
          Moz logo
          © 2021 - 2026 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
          • Accessibility
          • Terms of Use
          • Privacy

          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.