Is article syndication still a safe & effective method of link building?
-
Hello,
We have an SEO agency pushing to implement article syndication as a method of link building. They claim to only target industry-relevant, high authority sources. I am very skeptical of this tactic but they are a fairly reputable agency and claim this is safe and works for their other clients.
They sent a broadly written (but not trash) article, as well as a short list of places they would syndicate the article on, such as issuu.com and scribd.com. These are high authority sites and I don't believe I've heard of any algo updates targeting them.
Regarding linking, they said they usually put them in article descriptions and company bylines, using branded exact and partial matches; so the anchor text contains exact or partial keywords but also contains our brand name. Lately, I have been under the impression that the only "safe" links that have been manually built, such as these, should be either branded or simply your site's URL.
Does anyone still use article syndication as a form of link building with success? Do you see any red flags here?
Thanks!
-
Thanks everyone, you've helped solidify my position on this. Link building is extremely difficult and there are fewer and fewer "safe" activities, and unfortunately we don't have an active blog on this particular domain, but ideally I would rather they wrote 1 high quality article for our own site than 4 low quality articles for syndication.
Chris - I definitely agree that even if these articles don't hurt us in the short-run, they won't help us much in the long run, so I think I'll push back and get them to come up with some more ideas.
-
Is article syndication still a safe & effective method of link building?
People only "thought" it was "safe". Then penguin bit most of the websites that used article syndication.
We have an SEO agency pushing to implement article syndication as a method of link building.
When you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I don't syndicate anything. Never have, never well. A page of great content costs too much money to give away. It feeds existing competitors and creates new ones.
I simply write good content, post it on my own site, and traffic has grown steadily over time. The more good content you have up, the more keywords it competes for, the more traffic you get, the more money you make.
-
Article syndication may help you build links but often at a cost to your own site's search presence. In the past we syndicated content to many high authority sites and received much referral traffic. However, in the long term this came at a cost to our own site's ability to rank for our own content.
What would often happen is that, even though we had published the content on our site first, a high authority site would outrank us for that content. Very few content partners were willing to specify our version as the canonical version using a cross domain canonical and inevitably our search traffic began to fall.
Since Panda we've realised that unique quality content is a must, and while we may have lost out on the referral traffic we might have received from content partner sites, we figured that having unique content and being an authority in our own area of expertise is what we should be aiming at - not getting masses of referral traffic which is often bounced visits in any case.
Really you need to weigh up what the benefit is to you from syndicating your content and whether this is worth putting your own ability to rank in search for your own content at risk.
-
David,
Something that you can be sure of is that links like that are going to be of less and less value to your site in the future. So, even if, in fact, it's "safe and works for their other clients", I think we all understand that it's not Google's intention that such links will always carry the value they do now or once had. While it may not incur any penalty at this time, their value to your site may be dubious and thus the value of such a service for company may be as well.
What is the value of those links? It might all just boil down to the question: Are you getting what you paid for?--and I think that's what you're asking. But, unless you're willing to tell us the price you're paying for the service, it's hard to give you an answer. On the other hand, you could go to top-tier content publicist and get a quote from them and see how such pricing fits within your marketing budget philosophy. These days, the more editorially-given a link appears to be to Google, the greater its value. As you scale down from that, the cost for acquiring them should be less and less.
Your company's link building is a trajectory based on how quickly it wants/needs visibility, how much visibility it wants/needs, its budget for this type of marketing, as well as its knowledge/understanding of this type of marketing. Faster, shorter-term trajectories targeting relatively small markets are on one end of the scale and do have their place. Slower, long-term trajectories are on the other end of the scale and can effectively achieve different business objectives, but not all of them. Base on that scale, article marketing today is on the faster, shorter-term, relatively-less-traffic trajectory. Does that meet with your company's business objective(s) and is that what you believe you're paying for?
-
I would be skeptical too. It doesn't seem like a good long term tactic because the websites are not linking to you editorially. Article syndication is typically considered to be a placed link, which Google doesn't seem to value as much as an editorial recommendation.
Here's a video from Matt Cutts from Google about article marketing which sounds similar to what is being proposed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5xP-pTmlpY
"Honesty I'm not a huge fan of article marketing..These are not as much editorial links where someone is really making a choice this is a great site...I would probably lean away from that."
The exception is if the article is syndicated on a highly trusted publication like a Forbes.com or Huffington Post in which case the links are trusted and seen as valuable endorsements.
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
-
Buying links - where is the line drawn?
I apologise in advance if this has been discussed before, but I'm a bit confused by this whole buying links/outreach scenario. Example.. High ranking PR site (PR 85) has people advertising they can get you links from that site in exchange for money.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | nick-name123
You would give them an article and it would look natural and a link - branded or keyword - links back to you. This is not new to people here who know of this. Obviously there is a difference between a link farm (crap site just selling links) and one of these highly recognised sites where you can obtain a link from. I'm sure a goody 2 shoes will now tell me 'i should do everything natural not be tempted', but I actually dont know where the line is drawn between the same site giving a natural link to me and someone selling a link from the same site. Google isnt going to downgrade the site I'm sure but how do they combat this or even do they combat it? Do we have to accept that buying links is still a normal process and if done in moderation and discretely, you can get away with it?1 -
How Can I Safely Establish Homepage Relevancy With Internal Keyword Links?
My website has roughly 1000-2000 pages. However, our homepage is lacking relevancy as to what it is about. One way that I'd like to tackle this problem, is by updating many of our pages with internal linking. I often hear, use exact keyword links with caution, but have assumed this mainly referred to external backlinks. Would it be a disaster to set up our single most relevant keyword on about 300 pages and point it to our homepage? There are breadcrumbs on our site, but the home link uses an image (It's a picture of a house, if you're curious.) Am I better off just to change that to our most relevant keyword? I could use any advice on internal links for establishing better homepage relevancy. Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | osaka730 -
Does Google Consider a Follow Affiliate Link into my site a paid link?
Let's say I have a link coming into my domain like this http://www.mydomain.com/l/freerol.aspx?AID=674&subid=Week+2+Freeroll&pid=120 Do you think Google recognizes this as paid link? These links are follow links. I am working on a site that has tons of these, but ranks fairly well. They did lose some ranking over the past month or so, and I am wondering if it might be related to a recent iteration of Penguin. These are very high PR inbound links and from a number of good domains, so I would not want to make a mistake and have client get affiliates to no follow if that is going to cause his rankings to drop more. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Robertnweil10 -
Linking my pages
Hello everybody, i have a small dilemma and i am not shore what to do. I am (my company) the owner of 10 e-commerce web sites. On every site i have a link too the other 9 sites and i am using an exact keyvoerd (not the shop name).Since the web stores are big and have over a 1000 pages, this means thet all my sites have a lot off inbound links (compared with my competiton). I am woried that linking them all together could be bad from Googles point of wiev. Can this couse a problem for me, should i shange it? Regardes, Marko
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Spletnafuzija0 -
Are Directories Still of Any Value?
I know directories are an out-dated way to gain backlinks but the more I look into competitors that rank high link porfolio - many of thier top links come from paid directories. Granted, these can be old links but they still maintain highest authority, etc. Do you guys find directories still valuable as a linking building strategy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PaulDylan2 -
Removing Poison Links w/o Disavow
Okay so I've been working at resolving former black-hat SEO tactics for this domain for many many months. Finally our main keyword is falling down the rankings like crazy no matter how many relevant, quality links I bring to the domain. So I'm ready to take action today. There is one inner-page which is titled exactly as the keyword we are trying to match. Let's call it "inner-page.html" This page has nothing but poison links with exact match anchor phrases pointing at it. The good links I've built are all pointed at the domain itself. So what I want to do is change the url of this page and let all of the current poison links 404. I don't trust the disavow tool and feel like this will be a better option. So I'm going to change the page's url to "inner_page.html" or in otherwords, simply changed to an underscore instead of a hyphen. How effective do you think this will be as far as 404ing the bad links and does anybody out there have experience using this method? And of course, as always, I'll keep you all posted on what happens with this. Should be an interesting experiment at least. One thing I'm worried about is the traffic sources. We seem to have a ton of direct traffic coming to that page. I don't really understand where or why this is taking place... Anybody have any insight into direct traffic sources to inner-pages? There's no reason for current clients to visit and potentials shouldn't be returning so often... I don't know what the deal is there but "direct" is like our number 2 or 3 traffic source. Am I shooting myself in the foot here? Here we go!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jesse-landry0 -
Opinions sought on outbound Links page.
Hello Forum, I'm about the remove my outbound Links page at: http://www.pictureframe.com.au/---obs--picture-frames-links.html I think that Google could be assessing this page as a link scheme, ie: I-link-you-if-you-link me. I haven't received any messages from Google about this but I think the page may be devaluing my site. What do you guys~gals think? Thank you for any and all feedback Paul the Picture Framer
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Picframer0 -
Google Sitemaps & punishment for bad URLS?
Hoping y'all have some input here. This is along story, but I'll boil it down: Site X bought the url of Site Y. 301 redirects were added to direct traffic (and help transfer linkjuice) from urls in Site X to relevant urls in Site Y, but 2 days before a "change of address" notice was submitted in Google Webmaster Tools, an auto-generating sitemap somehow applied urls from Site Y to the sitemap of Site X, so essentially the sitemap contained urls that were not the url of Site X. Is there any documentation out there that Google would punish Site X for having essentially unrelated urls in its sitemap by downgrading organic search rankings because it may view that mistake as black hat (or otherwise evil) tactics? I suspect this because the site continues to rank well organically in Yahoo & Bing, yet is nonexistent on Google suddenly. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RUNNERagency0