Article Submission, is it Spam?
-
When looking at my competitors in Open Site Explorer, I see that most of them have hundreds of links from articles that are meaningless to a human with one or two links to their site using keywords in the last paragraph.
My guess is that these companies used an article creation/submission service since the article isn't 100% related to the link, but it is close.
Should I do this as well? Is it spam?
All of these sites rank higher than me for all terms and have higher scores in the competitive analysis.
-
I agree with dvtruong and Erica; doing guest posts on relevant sites is a good way to get links. It seems as if your competitors are doing a little black hat, which is never good and Google will catch up with them.
-
If it's meaningless for humans, it's spam to get them to rank higher. And I would suggest not using services like they have simply because Google has been going after sites who employ content farms for links. Instead, create quality, for-human content that promotes your niche. As dvtruong pointed out, doing guests posts on other quality sites is a great way to get links. You can also work partnerships out with other sites. Or use other 'white hat' ways to build your links. Eventually, your links will be of higher quality and thus, higher value to Google compared to your competitors. They will eventually get stung for using content farms.
-
I think that you can get a bigger boost to your site's authority if you focus on getting links from guest posts on relevant blogs with good domain authority than if you get links from a lot of low quality irrelevant sites. I believe that Google discounts links from article submission sites that have been abused in the past.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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.
Related Questions
-
Site Footer Links Used for Keyword Spam
I was on the phone with a proposed web relaunch firm for one of my clients listening to them talk about their deep SEO knowledge. I cannot believe that this wouldn’t be considered black-hat or at least very Spammy in which case a client could be in trouble. On this vendor’s site I notice that they stack the footer site map with about 50 links that are basically keywords they are trying to rank for. But here’s the kicker shown by way of example from one of the themes in the footer: 9 footer links:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RosemaryB
Top PR Firms
Best PR Firms
Leading PR Firms
CyberSecurity PR Firms
Cyber Security PR Firms
Technology PR Firms
PR Firm
Government PR Firms
Public Sector PR Firms Each link goes to a unique URL that is basically a knock-off of the homepage with a few words or at the most one sentences swapped out to include this footer link keyword phrase, sometimes there is a different title attribute but generally they are a close match to each other. The canonical for each page links back to itself. I simply can’t believe Google doesn’t consider this Spammy. Interested in your view.
Rosemary0 -
Got Google Manual penalty full Spam on my website
Here are Moz Metrics: http://prntscr.com/as3fp6 Site Url: www.financialprospect.com DA- 40 PA- 48 Spam Score - 0 RD- 68 Links No Loss in Backlink Profile I think my site is having much more spun content so can you suggest me the ways to re-index my site? How can i get my site back to google? Can you suggest any tool which give number of links already spun and then we may delete those posts. Looking for positive reply...!!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | morisshibu1 -
Blcoking Analytics Spam Referral Traffic
Hello, I'm starting to find some of our sites being heavily affected by spam referral traffic. I've been doing a bit of research, but it seems advice is changing all the time (or trying to sell me a service) Does anyone have any suggestions (or links to point me to) on the best way to block spam referral traffic (All our sites are Wordpress). Is there a way of blocking from past data or only future? Will blocking affect past moz data or is that permanently contaminated? I really don't quite understand what is in it for these spammers. Any advice greatly appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Publishing the same article content on Yahoo? Worth It? Penalties? Urgent
Hey All, I am currently working for a company and they are publishing exactly the same content on their website and yahoo. In addition to this when I put the same article's title it gets outranked by Yahoo. Isn't against Google guidelines? I think Yahoo also gets more than us since they are on the first position. How do you think should the company stop this practice? Please need urgent responses for these questions. Also look at the attachment and look at the snippets. We have a snippet (description) like the first paragraph but yahoo somehow scans the content and creates meta descriptions based on the search queries. How do they do That?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | moneywise_test0 -
Article pages not ranking as well as they should
Hello, Our articles here are not ranking as strongly as they should. Could you take a look and tell me why? When I search for the exact article title we do not come up. We used to. Note our sitewide footer links to some articles in case that's the problem, but even articles not in the footer links aren't performing.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Would you consider this keyword spam?
See these pages that we've created to rank. There are 3 types: Designed to be topic-specific:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mase
https://www.upcounsel.com/lawyers/trademark Designed to be location-specific:
https://www.upcounsel.com/lawyers/san-francisco Designed to be a combo of both topic & location:
https://www.upcounsel.com/lawyers/san-francisco-real-estate Are the keywords at the bottom too many and considered keyword spam? Any other SEO tips on these pages? I'm thinking about making them a bit more hierarchical, so there can be breadcrumbs and you could click back to San Francisco Lawyers from San Francisco Real Estate Lawyers. Good examples of sites that have dome structures like this really well?0 -
Article submission, and how to build backlinks for Ecommerce? [HELP]
Hi guys, I have a question, for high quality backlinks apparently you go to these article websites where you submit your site such as Ezine etc etc, however is it just one article you submit to these as it'll look like duplicate content? Also can I have it on my site first? How does it work? Also I run an ecommerce website, how can I build backlinks to each product, theres over 200+ products and 1.6k subcategories. I would like to rank for as many as possible but getting an SEO company to do this would cost to much. Any ideas on how I should go about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | InkCartridgesFast1 -
Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
Hi All, In relation to this thread http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-happend-to-my-ranks-began-dec-22-detailed-info-inside I'm still getting whipped hard from Google, this week for some reason all rankings have gone for the past few days. What I was wondering though is this, when Google says- Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations? I assume my site hits the nail on the head- [removed links at request of author] As you can see I target LG Optimus 3D Sim Free, LG Optimus 3D Contract and LG Optimus 3D Deals. Based on what Google has said, I know think there needs to be 1 page that covers it all instead of 3. What I'm wondering is the best way to deal with the situation? I think it should be something like this but please correct me along the way 🙂 1. Pick the strongest page out of the 3 2. Merge the content from the 2 weaker pages into the strongest 3. Update the title/meta info of the strongest page to include the KW variations of all 3 eg- LG Optimus 3D Contract Deals And Sim Free Pricing 4. Then scatter contract, deals and sim free throughout the text naturally 5. Then delete the weaker 2 pages and 301 redirect to the strongest page 6. Submit URL removal via webmastertools for the 2 weaker pages What would you do to correct this situation? Am I on the right track?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mwoody0