Spinning and blasting 1,000's of articles - does it really work?

I've asked the following questions to some very prominent members of the WF and wanted to share their responses. A special thanks goes out to Alexa Smith, Kay King, Nicole Beckett, and John McCabe. If you thank anyone, thank them.


Question:

I have a friend that is doing SEO locally and all he does is have articles written, spin them, then use Article Marketing Robot to submit them to 1,000's of directories. He does absolutely nothing else and charges $500- $900 a month to his clients for SEO. The articles are very low quality and not getting syndicated by relevant sites. The crazy part is that he's getting great results from just using this one method. Many clients that were not ranked at all are now on the #1 position. How is this possible?


Answers:
1.1.) Don't much agree with any of this one. I submit some articles to 2-3 top directories (or only EZA).

Good quality original articles - they get picked up by a few other sites - I often end with several good links from each article.

I don't spin articles - don't submit to vast directories - submit articles when a site is new and then occasionally after that.

2.2.) If the keywords are long-tail enough, and the number of backlinks high enough (high 6/7-figures) then it's possible. The spinning is adding nothing - this is certain. If he does the same thing without the spinning, he'll get the same results. Someone I know who has for the last 2 years been selling a service "based on spinning" has just discovered this, having refused to believe me about it for all that time. Some of these people are a little short of braincells and/or get terribly entrenched in "wanting to be right" about things and simply refuse to test them properly because they're convinced they "already know the answer".

3.3.) While the links you get from article directories don't have as high of a PR as many people think (after all your articles are getting published on their own individual page that has PR0 - NOT the site's home page that has a higher PR), I don't believe that any link is "useless" (unless you bought it or are trying to manipulate the system in some way - and, then, it's more detrimental than useless).

I do, however, think that it's a waste of time to submit articles to thousands of directories. After all, most of them are very low quality sites that get virtually no traffic and rarely get crawled by the spiders (so even the PR0 link you're getting from publishing there may take weeks or months to show up). I can only imagine that your friend doesn't have a whole lot of competition in those niches - and so any links (even a bunch of PR0's) is enough to vault him to the top.

4.4.) While it's true that backlinks from article submission sites have 'almost' no value, you can look at them like grains of sand. Pile up enough of them and you can play in the sandbox.

What's likely happening with your friend is that the combination of sites and local keywords mean that some links, regardless of quality, are better than no links.

If you have a keyword combo with virtually no other competition can be ranked with thousands of garbage links. In contrast, a similar keyword can be ranked with just a few high-quality links. Bill Platt (tpw) ran a test using an obscure phrase and managed to rank #1 using a single post on the Warrior Forum.