A few questions about Backlinks

Hi - welcome to the forum... I'll start the ball rolling here and answer the first couple of qs...

Backlinks from Article Directories, from my understanding, are not that valuable. Whereas the Article Directory may have a High PR the actual article pages have a PR 0 so are nothing to get excited about.

The whole point of submitting articles is Syndication - the hope that other websites and ezines will see you article, think its valuable and post it on their pages. This is where the powerful backlinks and traffic advantages come from because these individual websites may have High PR & Traffic.

And you can use old blog posts as articles once they are relevant and well written - no worries there.

If you really want to learn everything about Article Directories have a search for some posts by Alexa Smith - you will learn so much in those threads you'll be an expert in no-time

Yes: it's true already.

Using article directories for their own backlinks is a fallacy, as explained here. And here.

Once you understand what article directories are, what purpose they serve, and how they work, you'll immediately see that there's no real point in submitting to lots of them. I find Ezine Articles very good, because that's the one in which publishers look for content. Explained here: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ries-work.html

Yes. That's the basic idea. http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post4309204

Certainly not! Only they can gain from your doing that - you can't: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post6056478

One. Conceivably two. Certainly not more than three, anyway!

(There's no great downside in submitting to more than that - but there's no real benefit, either).

To me, they are.

Many search engines seem to ignore "NoDoFollow".

Many people believe that Google doesn't discount "no-follow" nearly as much as it sometimes claims: it's ambiguous at best.

People who have already decided that "no-follow" backlinks are no good for SEO won't be interested, but those like yourself who are a little more open-minded will find many threads here explaining/discussing interesting things about no-follow links: this one might start you off, and then there's more here, here, here, here, here, and so on.

I don't know.

It's terribly difficult to know.

Traffic from Yahoo Answers has certainly been worth the effort, for me, because at least some of it is "buying traffic".

My guess is not. People who like "page ranks" might enjoy them. Personally, I stopped caring about those when Google did. We can all see for ourselves the regularity with which lower-PR pages with far fewer (but relevant!) incoming backlinks outrank higher-PR pages with far more incoming backlinks in Google's SERP's.

Link-juice is all about relevance and quality, these days - exactly as Google said it would be.

I know from my own little bits of keyword research, when I'm "assessing the SEO-quality of the competition" by checking out the backlinks of the first few sites in Google's SERP's that if I find one with something like 100 backlinks all from decent-looking relevant sites, and almost nothing else, that may be a pretty tall order for me to beat, whereas I can typically overtake sites with "obvious automated, mass-backlinking" (of the "forum profile"/"article directory" type of backlinks) very quickly indeed, even if they have tens of thousands of backlinks.

I've stopped looking at page ranks altogether.

For me, they're a complete waste of time.

It seems to me that the only people who think otherwise are those with either a financial or an emotional attachment to them.

I don't know - sorry.

Not really, no. Directories are a stepping-stone to syndication. They're not syndication in themselves.

Again, this post will explain: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5068872

And this post explains why it would be a big mistake to try to get potential customer traffic from article directories.

You have to build your own syndication list. This is the business model of "article marketing". It's a relationship-building business.

These will be helpful ...

Directory of Ezines

Turn Words Into Traffic

This post explains (kind of!) how I do it, myself: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5035794

And this post offers suggestions on how to make sure your articles are written for syndication in the first place: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post3188316

I don't know - I wouldn't want to do that, for all the reasons explained above. Page ranks aren't very relevant to my business - not even to the SEO aspects of it. Quality and relevance are what matter, for my SERP's results.

It varies. Google indexes most frequently the sites that are updated most regularly. The most valuable ones tend to be indexed pretty quickly. Backlinks that need to be "pinged" or to have other backlinks built to them in order to be indexed are not worth having in the first place.

One tip for you, if it helps: try to stop looking at everything in terms of backlinks. The purpose of backlinks is just to "rank well" and thereby to be able to attract SEO traffic. But it's notoriously unreliable (Google's algorithms keep changing), and that's typically poor quality traffic for marketers anyway (as almost anyone who gathers traffic from multiple sources will tell you, other traffic sources tend to be far better targeted and turn far more easily into subscribers and customers). As so many Warriors have been learning over the last year or so, some of them to their very great cost, a business that depends on Google for its primary traffic is only ever going to be one algorithm-change away from an accident - maybe even from a complete disaster.

The good news for you is that article marketing (to which, clearly, many of your questions relate) isn't "part of SEO": it's a traffic generation system in its own right, regardless of Google.

Hi Alexa,

Thank you for your precious answer. It really has helped me a lot. My whole attitude towards "how to bring traffic to your website" has changed. I spent the whole day yesterday reading your posts - I probably examined like over a hundred of them. They came like a blessing to me I have the motivation, but lack the knowledge and experience. Hopefully, that changes soon. Thank you one more time. Noel, Thank you as well!