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
-
Moz spam score 16 for some pages - Never a manual penalty: Disavow needed?
Hi community, We have some top hierarchy pages with spam score 16 as per Moz due to the backlinks with very high spam score. I read that we could ignore as long as we are not employing paid links or never got a manual penalty. Still we wanna give a try by disavowing certain domains to check if this helps. Anyway we are not going to loose any backlink score by rejecting this low-quality backlinks. Can we proceed? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Spam signals from old company site are hurting new company site, but we can't undo the redirect.
My client was forced to change its domain name last year (long story). We were largely able to regain our organic rankings via 301-redirects. Recently, the rankings for the new domain have begun to plummet. Nothing specific took place that could have caused any ranking declines on the new site. However, when we analyze links to the OLD site, we are seeing a lot of link spam being built to that old domain over recent weeks and months. We have no idea where these are coming from but they appear to be negatively impacting our new site. We cannot dismantle the redirects as the old site has hundreds, if not thousands, of quality links pointing to it, and many customers are accustomed to going to that home page. So those redirects need to stay in place. We have already disavowed all the spam we have found on the old Search Console. We are continuing to do so as we find new spam links. But what are we supposed to do about this spam negatively impacting our new site? FYI we have not received any messages in the search console.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | FPD_NYC1 -
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 -
Read article and share your views
HI All, Yesterday i was read one article,As per article he is saying link building is very important so please read and share your views. http://searchengineland.com/7-things-wish-cmos-knew-link-building-192705
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dotlineseo0 -
Can a domain name alone be considered SPAM?
If someone has a domain that is spammy, such as "http://seattlesbestinsurancerates.com" can this cause Google to not index the website? This is not our domain, but a customer of ours has a similar one and it appears to be causing issues! Any thoughts? Thanks for any input!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tosten0 -
Disavow tool for blocking 4 to 5 sites for Article Republishing
Am finding some very low authority sites (recently picked our articles from ezine and other article sites - written over a year back) and pasted on to there site. The number of articles copies are not 1 or 2, but more than 10-12 in all these domains This has also led to our anchor based url - backlink to us from them (a part of article). Have Wrote down to remove my author profile and articles - but there has been no response from webmaster of these sites. Is Disavow a right approach. The number of such sites are 4 or 5 in nature !!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Modi0 -
How is this achieved - SPAM
Hello everyone. Here's my problem: I just searched for "link inside iframe counts for backlinking?" and on #5 there's a site that caught my attention because of it's Description Snippet. http://www.freelancer.com/job-search/iframe-links-count-backlinks/ This page is totally irrelevant to my query if you take time and read what's on it, however it ranks well. It's clever because the page contains all the required elements: one h1 with keyword in it, some short paragraph under it, similar links (totally irrelevant though), a selection of people who are supposed to be relevant to my question but they are not, all the good stuff. I looked in the source code and i found this: link href="[http://www.freelancer.com/rss/search.xml?keyword=iframe+links+count+backlinks](view-source:http://www.freelancer.com/rss/search.xml?keyword=iframe+links+count+backlinks)" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Latest projects" Please take the time and look at this feed and you'll see something totally wrong here. Could someone please explain how this works? I'ts a total spam however they managed to trick the system... Looking forward to hearing your answers. Alex
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pwpaneuro0 -
Why Do People Send In Fake Form Submissions?
I get a lot of form submissions through my website that are clearly not actual people (unless they are insane . . ). It fills out stuff nonsensically, has an email address, and usually some stupid snippet of text that makes no sense. Does anyone know why people do this? Clearly there can't be any SEO benefit to submitting to someones web form. I guess if I added a "captcha" option it would put a stop to this . .
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | damon12120