Article submission

Hi Dave, Alexa ...

Dave, Alexa is right. Article submitters are bad news these days. This tactic might have worked years ago but today you will get penalized big time, and the valid reasons for submitting articles are not to get traffic or backlinks but to get your articles syndicated to other sites. A couple of good article directories is all you need ...

People did (perhaps), up until 2009-ish. It was (arguably) plausible, in those days, to acquire enormous numbers of backlinks through mass article directory submission, and although of absolutely tiny value, accumulating literally half a million of them was worth something. There was someone here, when I first arrived, who had a WSO service intended to produce 1,000,000 backlinks per day from article directories and "private blog networks" (on multiple .info sites, and not renewed after the expiration of the initial year's domain-registration :p ), and people bought them and it did appear to work - to some extent. Exactly the kind of operation that Google's more recent updates have now effectively rendered futile/punitive. This stuff is "historical" now.

It was (while it lasted) an attempt to use article directories for a purpose for which they were never intended at all, but I understand that at one time it did actually have some limited value.

There are all kinds of services being promoted to beginning marketers.

Some are offered by people who can themselves earn a living far more easily by selling "services"/"tuition" to the constant high turnover of beginning marketers than they ever could by putting into practice in their own businesses exactly the information/products/services they're now touting to others.

Selling shovels is far easier than digging for gold - of course, I don't suggest there's necessarily or intrinsically anything wrong with that at all, but it also remains simply factual that many of the shovels, in this context, are riddled with massive holes and are being sold by people who couldn't profitably dig with them.

Rarely, if ever, have the words "caveat emptor" applied more appropriately than in the case of "SEO services".

I understand.

You need backlinks on sites (not "pages"!) which are relevant to your own site. ("Relevance", in this context, is determined by Google - in ways never fully described snd frequently debated/guessed about - by keyword commonality, but that's "of the site", not "of the page". Which explains why a backlink from a blog/site on the subject as yours is typically worth (literally) tens of thousands of times as much linkjuice as (for example) an article directory backlink.

Article syndication to relevant sites helps a lot.

Backlinks from relevant forums and blogs help a lot.

"Numbers of backlinks" and even "page ranks" are far less helpful, these days.

If you'll excuse one further digression (if it is a "digression"), personally, I'd advise you not to put too much of your time and effort into trying to attract "organic SERP's" traffic, for two main reasons: first, it's very precarious and makes your business Google-dependent, and any business that's Google-dependent is no more than one algorithm-change away from a potential accident (or even a potential disaster), as so many Warriors have been finding out over the last year or two, some of them to their very great cost; secondly, for me, search engine traffic has been uniformly the worst-converting traffic out of everything I've ever tried in 8 entirely different niches over the whole of the last 4 years - search engine visitors to all my websites typically stay the least time, view the fewest pages, opt in the least often and actually buy anything by far the least often. I admit I do get tons of search engine traffic to all my main sites (because high rankings for multiple keywords happen to be a minor side-benefit of the main targeted traffic-generation method I use to build my business) but I'd certainly hate to have to make a living just from that traffic, and I wouldn't even be cursing too much if Google de-indexed all my sites this afternoon.

Thanks for appreciating that I intend my comments (yesterday and today) helpfully rather than critically.

Call me a skepchick, but I'm surprised if it can do that.

I hadn't heard of it at all. I've just now looked quickly at its home-page/sales-page, and noticed the claim that "backlinking sites will always be related to your keyword and website" and am duly skeptical about it.

Reading the description of "what it does"/"how it works", only quickly I admit, I feel as confident as I can be that if Google knows/thinks/feels that someone's backlinks have been built using that type of software, they will intend and eventually manage to penalize heavily or even de-index the recipient sites. This is kind of obvious, no? After all, this was - as they've said openly and consistently - the underlying motivation and specific purpose behind the original Penguin update, and further, ongoing algorithm updates. It's not like there's any "deep secret" about their intention to penalize people for this?

For myself, I categorically wouldn't touch it. This is all I can say.

Things do, don't they? Otherwise they don't sell. But eventually, the hammer drops. What you're saying about this software has been said 100 times in the past about other equivalents, and there are now plenty of threads here in which Warriors are cursing the fact that they ever used them (or bought "SEO services" without understanding clearly exactly what would and wouldn't be used!).

Trying to "game the system" (and that's undeniably exactly what this is!) simply isn't a solid, long-term business plan. http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-...d-tactics.html . I'm a "negative poster" on this subject, I know - and I'm embarrassed by it, sometimes. Sorry.

It's only SEO traffic, you know? It doesn't pay the mortgage anyway ... :p