Promoting a site using articles

link building query

[calummacd]

Hello there.

If I'm building a link campaign using articles, is it a good idea to link back to my site from the article just once or a few times?

If I've written a 500 word article, should I be getting one backlink to my homepage or one to my homepage and a few to other pages on my site? If I have, say, five backlinks from one article obviously the link juice is going to be weakened, but is this a big deal?

[lufc1955]

Generally speaking, what is allowed is one or two links in your article signature and no hyperlinks in the body of the article. You can use keywords in the anchor text in your signature if you want.

[martinibuster]

You may consider bypassing article directories and forming direct relationships with individual publishers. You can then place anchor text wherever you want, according to the agreement you reached with the publisher.

Arranging this isn't easy. But it may result in better placement than what you'll receive in article directories.

[directwheels]

articles don't really work anymore. Google has been aware of this "link building" technique for a long time, my personal experiments have also shown them to be almost completely useless in Google. On Yahoo, however, it worked pretty well up until the recent update. I had a spam site or two that had not much valuable content on there and all the links came from article directories. They got very good traffic from Yahoo until 2 weeks ago, when I experience a 50% drop.

But overall, it's really not worth it anymore. Write some good articles instead and put it on your site to attract links or syndicate it out to REAL sites other than article directories, you will be much better off that way.

[lfgoal]

"articles don't really work anymore. "

I'm not so sure about this. For a given niche, it does seem to work to some extent on lesser competitive phrases, say 2nd and third-level phrases. Some of my own competitors use article submission as a primary means of promoting pages. It doesn't get them very far for primary phrases, but, like I said, on the others, it does "seem" to give a little umphh. I think the thing is to forget about the perceived value of having an article syndicated word-for-word all over the place on junk blogs. The real value of an article submitted to an article directory will simply be the article directory that google decides is the first and most authoritative instance of carrying the page/article. In other words, I wouldn't bother submitting an article to multiple directories. Instead, if I was going to submit a batch of articles, I would simply submit each one to one directory only.

[martinibuster]

Good observation, lfgoal.

[CainIV]

I would agree lfgoal. I might add that moving up inner pages, or longer tail terms does have an impact on overall 'primary' phrases, and a large percentage of deep links, even from article directories, generally does help to rank those pages better and keep the cache date on those pages fresh.

[Reno_Chris]

The other thing you need to watch is a "no rel" label - many article directory sites now use this to discourage spamming to their site and retain the link juice they have.

If you are going to use article directories, be sure to use the one or two strongest and make sure they are ones that do not use the "no rel" label on all their outgoing links.

[edited by: Reno_Chris at 8:21 am (utc) on Jan. 6, 2009]