????

Haha, I had to laugh at your last point, Marcus.

I had the same initial feeling, however, I think Rand makes a really awesome point right near the end.  It's not necessarily a moral issue, but rather what ELSE you could be doing with your time than spinning articles to these directories.

I would much rather use that time to start connecting with other bloggers in my space and start building those relationships for future guests posts and links that will last a life-time.

It's hard for me as a SEO noob... the low hanging fruit is tempting and deceptive.  I'm just glad the community is here to guide us.

Thanks!

Anjon,

Thanks for the link.  I've been working my way through the whiteboard Fridays but hadn't gotten to this one yet.

I just watched it and won't be submitting any articles to the site, thanks!

I'm digging my way through my competitors' link profiles on OSE and came across one that had been using a site called ArticleBase.com

Apparently you can publish articles for free and browse other published articles for usage on your own site (provided you follow their TOS).  It actually seems like a nifty idea.

I'm wondering if anyone has utilized this site for re-publishing content and building external links.

Worth the effort?

Thanks!

Thanks Marcin, that makes more sense.

For example, I noticed papercheck had a ton of links from verisign.  It appears they did some case-study for the company and the links were all over their other country specific domains, etc.

It makes sense that it would be more about increasing the number of linking root domains than the total number of links and I now understand how one link on a very large site can result in hundreds, if not thousands, of links.

I didn't really understand this and in the back of my mind I keep hearing Rand telling me that link building is valuable but hard work and time consuming.  I'm thinking... s*$t, it really is going to be a lot of work to get 100,000 links  

But it's nice to know I need to simply focus on high quality linking domains... easy enough

Thanks for the reply, that helps and makes sense!

I've been analyzing some of our competitors: essayedge.com and papercheck.com

Both sites have a large number of 'total links'... about 93,000 each.  The former has about 1,200 linking root domains while the latter only has 195.  Even for 1,200 linking root domains, 93k total links seems like a ton to me.

Our site has 101 linking root domains and only 299 'total links'.

I'm quite new to this whole SEO game and admittedly still learning a TON.  Am I missing something here?  How do sites generate so many links?  This seems nuts to me.

Thanks for any help!