Would you agree wiht this SEO theory? (TheHutz where are you)

[DaleP]

An SEO guy mentioned this to me....would you agree? I'm not sure i agree entirely...

Article directories, as I explained in the meeting; Google does not look at them in the same high regard as it once did. And sometimes flooding the internet with articles is actually detrimental to your sights SERP rankings. A site may have a good PR but that is then filtered down by how many sites it links out to – and a an increasing trend of sites using mainly articles is actually hurting their potential rankings, but we can go through this a little more next week.

..specifically the part where he mentions that getting plenty articles out there can be bad...(TheHutz as you mentioned this cannot be true as then your competitors would be able to screw you over by flooding the internet with articles and pointing back to your site to damage your rankings, google wouldnt allow this)

Also, what does he mean by a particular site with high PR can have its PR lowered purely because it has many outbound links.

[TheHutz]

Hey Dale,

Right - lets take a look...

It is true that most article directories aren't given as much value by Google as they used to. Article marketing originally was used more as a tool to get your content out there. Once it was discovered about the backlink value people started going over the top.

There is one article directory for sure (there are others but can't think off top of my head) that is still considered fine - especially by Google and that is EzineArticles Submission - Submit Your Best Quality Original Articles For Massive Exposure, Ezine Publishers Get 25 Free Article Reprints

The reason being, is the strong editorial process articles go through to even be accepted. This editorial process is valued by Google as it is unlikely rubbish content will be allowed in.

With regards to Pagerank - this is the best way I can describe what he's saying (which is true)

Say you have a bucket full of water - the water is your pagerank/link juice that you have built up.

You decide to link to someone. By doing so, you have just put a whole in your bucket and are beginning to lose your PR (water).

The more people you link to, the more holes in your bucket, and the more water you lose.

Hope that makes sense?

Oh by the way, I sent you a PM on here yesterday, let me know what you think.

[DaleP]

thanks big help!

[silverf0x]

thanks for nice and usefull information. thanks for both of you

[CTABUK]

This may help as well
Bot Herding: The Ultimate Tool for PageRank Sculpting

[dotslash]

Say you have a bucket full of water - the water is your pagerank/link juice that you have built up.

You decide to link to someone. By doing so, you have just put a whole in your bucket and are beginning to lose your PR (water).

The more people you link to, the more holes in your bucket, and the more water you lose.

But doesn't that means EZA and all those other do follow article directories would be losing PR every time they allow a link out. I suspect it is more complicated than that - I personally have seen positive benefits to linking out to relevant websites.

That approach actively discourages linking out to web sites, whereas the value of a page to google is the amount of relevant information (including links) on it to a search query. Of course PR is seemingly much less important on the serps than previously.

Although I may have got this wrong, in my experience linking out in moderation seems to have a positive effect -certainly doesn't seem to lose PR either.

I can certainly see the point that having loads of links from article sites can have an increasingly negligible effect - the search engines are usually way ahead of the popular backlinking methods. Usually content is the only thing that seems to have long lasting results.

Interesting subject though.

Neil

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by DaleP

..specifically the part where he mentions that getting plenty articles out there can be bad...

He's incorrect here. While a well crafted blackhat campaign that used incoming links as part of it might hurt your rankings, ordinary article submissions won't hurt you. They may not help you much, if any at all, but they won't hurt you.

Originally Posted by DaleP

Also, what does he mean by a particular site with high PR can have its PR lowered purely because it has many outbound links.

This is part of the public, patented, Google algorithm from around 1998-2000. However, it's based on the page, not the domain as a whole. If the consultant said it was on a site basis he was off-base there too. A site wide lowering would be the result of the entire site being a link farm or that they were caught selling links.

There is also some evidence that suggests that Google has adjusted their algorithm to ignore or discount certain common PageRank sculpting techniques. For example, it appears that linking out to authority sites, such as Wikipedia or CNN, might be helpful to you.

Basically, today it's a lot more complicated that just having "too many outbound links".

[Tyrus Antas]

I don't believe that Google will actually punish you. It's just that tons of links coming from a very small number of sites doesn't get you enough domain variety to get full link juice from Google.

Tyrus

[Smokey_Joe]

The thing that's bothering me in the original quote is the phrase "a site's pr". This is confusing really: pagerank is assigned to pages, not sites (fair enough), and still we are talking about the site's pr leaking. Is it about the homepage pr? Or is the leaking process evenly distributed all over the site? There must be something I'm missing out here.

Which brings me to an idea: are internal pr values determined by the homepage pr? Or is it just the internal linking factor?

[LoreCee]

Originally Posted by bgmacaw

ordinary article submissions won't hurt you. They may not help you much, if any at all, but they won't hurt you.

I've also found that article submissions don't do much for my sites. Which do you think is more valuable for improving SERP ranking: links from article directories like the ones you get with article submission services, or links from social bookmarking sites like the ones you get with Bookmarking Demon?

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by LoreCee

Which do you think is more valuable for improving SERP ranking: links from article directories like the ones you get with article submission services, or links from social bookmarking sites like the ones you get with Bookmarking Demon?

You need to use a combination of methods. Remember that lower value links (article, directory, bookmarking) can help get new content and new domains indexed quicker and even give them a temporary ranking boost but don't have a lot of long term value. For the long term, you need to build stable, contextual, links the best way you can.

[DaleP]

I've also found that article submissions don't do much for my sites.

could others coment on this from their experiences? Surely back links from articles plays a fairly big part in getting good ranking? (along with directory submissions,social bookmarking,blog posts,links from functional non-directory websites etc.)

[DaleP]

think you just answered my question!

[Black Hat Cat]

Originally Posted by TheHutz

Hey Dale,

With regards to Pagerank - this is the best way I can describe what he's saying (which is true)

Say you have a bucket full of water - the water is your pagerank/link juice that you have built up.

You decide to link to someone. By doing so, you have just put a whole in your bucket and are beginning to lose your PR (water).

The more people you link to, the more holes in your bucket, and the more water you lose.

Not quite. A page will not have it's PR reduced because it links out to other pages or sites.

[Best Affiliate]

Originally Posted by LoreCee

I've also found that article submissions don't do much for my sites. Which do you think is more valuable for improving SERP ranking: links from article directories like the ones you get with article submission services, or links from social bookmarking sites like the ones you get with Bookmarking Demon?

Articles should help you with your sites if the article is properly written placing the keywords in the right places. That is why a lot of companies hire professional seo companies to do this. When I first started I wrote articles as well linking back to my sites and never got credit for them. Come to find out I didn't write them correctly. LSI or latent semantic indexing is something that google looks at and basically will look at your links and the words around them. Google will look at other sites that are ranking highly for those keywords and look at the expert words associated with this keywords youre trying to optimize for.

As for which is better article directories or social bookmarking sites it has to be the social sites the way things are going now. Actively participating in these sites with good content is def what google is looking at now google wants to have real people getting the best search results. If your successful in social media you will be successful in search results

My two cents

[Best Affiliate]

Originally Posted by Smokey_Joe

The thing that's bothering me in the original quote is the phrase "a site's pr". This is confusing really: pagerank is assigned to pages, not sites (fair enough), and still we are talking about the site's pr leaking. Is it about the homepage pr? Or is the leaking process evenly distributed all over the site? There must be something I'm missing out here.

Which brings me to an idea: are internal pr values determined by the homepage pr? Or is it just the internal linking factor?

Internal pages and and link juice and how you have linked from page to page is very important. You dont want to have your most important pages linking to your least important pages and letting the page juice or page rank leak out. Use robots.txt fiiles to let google know which pages should be given more value than others etc.

[askloz]

Originally Posted by Smokey_Joe

The thing that's bothering me in the original quote is the phrase "a site's pr". This is confusing really: pagerank is assigned to pages, not sites (fair enough), and still we are talking about the site's pr leaking. Is it about the homepage pr? Or is the leaking process evenly distributed all over the site? There must be something I'm missing out here.

approx 85% of a pages' PR value is assigned / shared to ALL of the links on a page.

Originally Posted by Smokey_Joe

Which brings me to an idea: are internal pr values determined by the homepage pr? Or is it just the internal linking factor?

Both...

I created a site about 2 years ago, all I did was point one page to another (internal linking), just like wiki-pedia to run an experiment if I could still rank for phrases without getting 3rd party backlinks pointing to my site... In 2-3 months, I was ranking on first page, with No#1-5 rankings, with inner pages with PR1-2, with a index page PR value of 3.

PR is not only measured by the links pointing to your site's pages, but how the site's related documents match / further extend on elaborating on a particular topic in more detail.

[Daniel McGonagle]

I recommmend using EZA for only getting a few links for new sites and to use those articles to get anchor text for your sites' main KWs, anything other than that to the same site becomes less effectiv eover time and your time will be better spent using article syndication services like UAW or MAN to spread your content, increase your CHANCES of getting referral traffic and to ge tlinks form more IP addresses, no matter the quality of the sites your articles are syndicated on or evne their relevancy, they're still links form different IP addresses.

The promote the promoters... meaning get some backlinks however possible to your EZA articles to boost them in the SERPs, over time those EZAs will gain PR and the value of those links will increase over time.

IMHO, EZA will never die but it's pretty stupid to use their 97/month service when you could use both My Article Network and Unique Article Wizard for pretty much the same price to exponentially increase the number of places (IP addresses) your spun articles get syndicated to, while spinning and rotating your URLS getting linked to, all at the same time.

[TheHutz]

Originally Posted by blackhatcat

Not quite. A page will not have it's PR reduced because it links out to other pages or sites.

Yes - sorry. Thanks for that. I got a bit carried away with the bucket!

You don't literally lose PR when linking out. You pass on a proportion of the value of your page.

The more external links you have, the less each link is "worth" as it is sharing the value with others.

[Smokey_Joe]

Originally Posted by askloz

I created a site about 2 years ago, all I did was point one page to another (internal linking), just like wiki-pedia to run an experiment if I could still rank for phrases without getting 3rd party backlinks pointing to my site... In 2-3 months, I was ranking on first page, with No#1-5 rankings, with inner pages with PR1-2, with a index page PR value of 3.

PR is not only measured by the links pointing to your site's pages, but how the site's related documents match / further extend on elaborating on a particular topic in more detail.

Thank you for the response, Loz, this is quite new to me... So, are you implying that it is necessary to interlink only related internal pages? And, come to think of it, a completely nooby question: how is that achieved?

[DaleP]

Thanks all, Im going to check out My Article Network and Unique Article Wizard.

Which one do you guys prefer? Is one able to post to say 100 article directories all at once and can you select which directories to post to? This sounds a bit too good to be true, are there down sides to using such a service like this as opposed to manually submitting your articles one by one.

[daijoubu]

What everyone else has said pretty much sums it up.

[Steven Heron]

Hi Dale,

Whilst you won't hurt your sites rankings through article marketing, you won't necessarily gain anything either if the article sites are mostly "junk". That being said, Google likes to look for patterns more than anything.

I know it may be controversial to say this, but my experience supports it: you can even get as many as 10,000 backlinks a week to a brand new website without those backlinks being filtered, just so long as you keep this sort of high backlink building ongoing each week. Things start to look off the moment Google sees a massive "spike" in backlinks within a certain time period, and then no or very few backlinks for months after that. The quantity isn't of concern, it's the spacing out, and the consistency that is.

In terms of an Article Submission Service, any of the big brand name ones will do. They all use similar, and in some cases even the same, directories.

[TheHutz]

That's right Steve,

There are plenty of viral sites/videos that have an explosion of links due to them having a current buzz.

I've also heard that they try to recognise that if it is down to a burst of activity such as a new tv advert, controversial article/news item - then it stands to reason there will be a spike and then a dip.

Of course, as to how easy they can determine that - thats a different matter.

I agree, consistency is key really.

[Steven Heron]

That's exactly right Hutz,

A small site that releases a juicy piece of link bait, or that reaches top rankings in the Social Bookmarking sites for whatever reason, will have that unexpected growth explosion, and of course Google's algorithms take that into account.

But yes, for long term SEO building, consistency is what you need. Also you'll want a mix of backlinks from high ranking, trusted domains along with lower ones.

Dale, just think what would Google expect to happen if you released a great new website in your niche. They'd expect mostly low-mid ranking sites to give it a link, with a few high ranking sites as well, steadily, and consistently, over time. Giving the Google bot this "illusion" is the key to SEO, whether the stakes are small, or high.

[Diane S]

I am pleased as punch with Unique Article Wizard due to the ability to have unlimited pen names. I am impressed with Bookmarking Demon for ease in automation and great support. Edwin's training videos are very thorough.

[Jenie0109]

Originally Posted by CTABUK

This may help as well
Bot Herding: The Ultimate Tool for PageRank Sculpting

really you can sculpt page rank?