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
-
Inbound links to internal search with pharma spam anchor text. Negative seo attack
Suddenly in October I had a spike on inbound links from forums and spams sites. Each one had setup hundreds of links. The links goes to WordPress internal search. Example: mysite.com/es/?s=⚄
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Arlinaite470 -
What to do with internal spam url's google indexed?
I am in SEO for years but never met this problem. I have client who's web page was hacked and there was posted many, hundreds of links, These links has been indexed by google. Actually these links are not in comments but normal external urls's. See picture. What is the best way to remove them? use google disavow tool or just redirect them to some page? The web page is new, but ranks good on google and has domain authority 24. I think that these spam url's improved rankings too 🙂 What would be the best strategy to solve this. Thanks. k9Bviox
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AndrisZigurs0 -
Backlink an article thats already on the web
Hey Mozers, Just wondering I noticed a few sites show "this article first appeared on domain.com" if there has been an article published on another site and is now publsihed on ours, how do we create a backlink to say it had first appeared on "domain.com" Any advice would be much appreciated Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may1 -
Corporate Spam - How do you deal with them?
Seeklearning.com.au - I don't see why they should be dominating the SERPs here in Australia, except for the fact that the have 1 million+ links from 4 or 5 corporate affiliates (Yahoo, MSN, etc). But i thought Google caps the amount of sidewide links from one domain? Or do they make an exception in some cases? Note: if you're looking at their profile with Majestic, you need to see their backlink history. There was a massive spike in linking root domains recently from spam. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andrep0 -
Attacked with spam links.
Our website was hit with the "Pharma hack", "Google Cloaking Hack", or "Blackhat SEO Spam". and Google showed in the results this website may be compromised. After cleaning out the hack from the website I chacked with the Seomoz tool Open Site Explorer and I found that they hacked 1000 of other websites and created links to my website. They were building a few 1000 links to the website with the clickable text "buy cheap online pharmacy". and more like that. This website www.washington23.com has been hacked and gives over 200 links to your website for pharmacy items. And Google considers this from your impotent links as i can see in webmasters. What can I do about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Will cleaning up old pr articles help serps?
For a few years we published articles with anchor text backlinks to about 10 different article submission sites. Each article was modified to create similar different articles. We have about 50 completely unique articles. This worked really well for our serps until google panda & penguin updates. I am looking for advice on whether I should have a major clean up of the published articles and if so should I be deleting them, removing or renaming anchor text backlinks? Any advice on what strategy would work best would be appreciated as I don't want to start deleting backlinks and making it worse. We used to enjoy position 1 but are now at 12-15 so have least most of our traffic.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | devoted2vintage0 -
Local Listing Spam - Why is Google Missing this?
I have a competitor that ranks in Google Search for a Top Dollar Keyword in the organic rankings with the normal result, however just below that it shows another result that contains the Local City Name followed by their business name. In the URL they have domain.com > Local and below the description data it shows a map for a totally different location as this competitor only has one location... Once clicking on the link I found that it has everything in the title, description and h1 and body content in footer that talks about the local area but not their product. and when you click the breadcrumbs you can go back to a directory of all the other cities and states they are targeting with doorway pages with the same layout however the anchor text is cityname+keyword How are they getting away with this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ben-HPB0 -
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