Article Marketers! Back-linking your articles through web 2.0...

Hi Sam - in my opinion this is absolutely dreadful advice which can damage your business in the long-term.

You should be backlinking to the copies of your articles on your own sites, not the ones in article directories!

Whose websites and business are you trying to build up: yours, or the article directories?

I use article directories to get traffic from them, not send my traffic (i.e. traffic produced by my backlinking campaigns) to them!

If you build backlinks to copies of your articles in article directories, you'll end up with a situation in which the article directories perpetually outrank your own site for your own keywords! Sounds like a pretty good thing to avoid, I think?

It's true that there can be a short-term advantage, purely in terms of immediate traffic-flow, to building backlinks to article directories, and this is why it leads so many people astray, which is in turn part of the reason why the failure-rate in "article marketing" is so high.

I can recommend - and strongly - that you avoid doing this.

The important thing is to publish your articles on your own site first, and only after they've been indexed there submit them to any article directories, and make the backlinks to your own site's copies of the articles, not to anyone else's - or at the very least, particularly and specifically not to a directory's. All explained and discussed in great detail in this fine thread, which will really tell you all you need to know about this subject.

Congratulations on your second sale!

Hi Sam,

Just to confuse you even more - I disagree with Alexa.

If getting links to your articles on other high traffic sites is an easy addition to your existing link building then you'd be crazy not to.

After all - the reason you're posting them there at all is to get access to their traffic and if you know that they will end up sending you more traffic because your articles get seen by more people (they show up better in the serps and some directories give featured and 'most viewed' visibility too) then that supports your business.

It's not about sending 'your' traffic to them - it's about building up the value and 'weight' of your assets.

However, if you're thinking of carrying out completely separate link building activities just for articles on other properties then I'd take a close look at the difference it makes so that you're not wasting your time and energy on something that doesn't increase your business.

Short story = support whatever brings you business

Long story = make sure you know the impact or return your activities have before blindly doing things.

You need to remember that there's a difference between linking for 'weight' and PageRank and linking for traffic. When you're clear about what each link is for - some will support linking to other properties and some won't so just understand why you do what you do and you'll be fine.

I think many people have their way of doing things and sometimes don't realise that there are other things that people using different strategies will consider that make different choices make sense so just do what makes sense for you.

Andy

There was an article some time back which claimed - and supported with some detailed stats - that you get more link juice from backlinking a site that links to your site than you get from backlinking your own site, PROVIDED the backlink is indexed first.

The process outlined there was to post an article on your own site, then submit it to several low PR auto-approve "dofollow" article directories, then social bookmark the articles.

The idea there was that the social bookmarks would be indexed first, because the article directories were low-PR, and that would flow greater PR back to your site than if you just social BMed your own site in the first place.

I don't actually know whether this ever worked, but it's the likely source of the advice given to the OP.

Hi there,

Thanks for the replies, I run a blogger, but my squeeze page is separate from this and its this squeeze page where where I really want to drive traffic.

The reason I ask, is that backlinking the article directories would give my original articles potential higher ranking, so this could be useful?

Sam

I makes sense in the notion that it makes your articles more valuable, which therefore makes the link from your articles more valuable.

Just be sure not to overdo it, you don't want your articles outranking your actual pages, which some people have actually had trouble with.

I have and do link back to my articles. I also go further and backlink the RSS they provide you on some.....either way the links go back to MY article and other articles I wrote within the same niche AND those anchor text links go back to my site either way.