I thought I’d tackle this monster, i see it crop up time and time again on various webmaster and SEO forums but the question of whether article submission marketing still works never actually seems to be conclusively answered. Yes, we all know that Google’s a lot smarter nowadays implementing filters for just about everything that used to make our jobs easier.
We know that Google hates duplicate content and I understand that, after all if I was paying for the disk space I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want a few hundred copies of the same content. That’s like being in a library and seeing 100 copies of the same book. We also know that duplicate copies of your articles quickly slip into the supplemental index but what about the links you attached at the end of your lovingly prepared article. Do those links still count?
Article Submission still forms part of my online marketing strategy however it’s only ever formed part of a larger strategy and as such it’s difficult to gauge how much of the success i’ve experienced with various sites over the years is attributable in any way to the articles I produce and submit or other factors that form part of my online marketing.
Bearing in mind that a large chunk of online marketing is based on intelligent informed speculation my mindset on this is as follows. Whilst I completely agree from a search perspective it benefits no-one for there to be multiple copies of the same document in the SERP’S. I don’t however believe Google can completely discount links in all duplicated documents without sites that have legitimately earnt those links suffering. There are numerous valid reasons why a document would be re-produced, if google wants to return the most relevant results it cant discount this.
Example 1.
In a shock move Microsoft have announced that they are buying Sony! Microsoft produce an official press release, part of which they have granted news sites permission to replicate on their site provided they link back crediting the original source. News is by its nature viral, especially big news. The Sites/Companies making the news are the ones that Google wants in its results.
Example 2.
Imagine you’ve put a great deal of time and effort into producing a technical document thats of value to the online community. A document that’s reproduced 1000’s of times due to its brilliance. Don’t you deserve a little link love for this achievement?
So lets do a little test - I have a number of sites that I don’t actively promote. They are non profit fun sites that I’ve put no SEO time into. Once completed I simply generated a few links to ensure the search engines know about them. The site I’ve chosen is a couple of years old so there’s no issues with the sandbox etc.
I’m now going to attempt to improve the SERP’s for this site using ONLY article marketing. I’ve already produced one article and submitted it to 130 article syndication sites that I know actively approve articles. This was just over a month ago. At this stage I’ve seen no improvement in SERP’s. This isn’t uncommon however as Google likes to crawl links a few times before it releases any “link juice”.
I’ll re-visit this in a couple of weeks and update this post. Once i’m satisfied I have conclusive results i’ll release details of the site and the key phrase targeted.
** update 1 ** - the site in question has started jumping between position 15-20 and 40-50. SERP’s should settle in the next week or so.
** update 2 ** 26/09/07 - page is nestled at the bottom of page 1 **
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