news syndication articles. How does one get an article in?

[costica]

Hi,

Very new to SEO. Very intriguing stuff.

I started studying a few days ago. On-site optimization is fairly easy to achieve and straight-forward.

Off-site optimization not so easy.

Since incoming links are huge for Google, I went to Google and searched our competitor's inbound links. MOST of the competitor's inbound links are coming from web/print "newspaper" sites, from a SINGLE and word-for-word identical article that appears in:

www theotherpaper com
www torringtontelegram com
www finditelpaso com
www journalnow com
and MANY others

All of the above or almost all have a Google PR of 4 or 5.
The competitor itself has a Google PR of 4.

The author doesn't have an name. (Almost) all the articles on these news(paper) sites start with initials like (BPT), or (NEWSUSA), or (ARA), or (NAPSI), etc.

So the question now, since this is a question post:
How does one get an article in this circle or other circles of syndication news? And then, after NewsUSA for example adds article to their directory, do each of the web newspapers choose to include it or not? Or is it automatically added to their newspaper in the appropriate category?

Regards,
Costica

[ALorenzo]

Regardless of who is supplying the articles, at the end of the day each news site is still deciding what it runs so you'll have to consider your content carefully regardless.

The best thing to do is to continue research. Most of these syndication sites are thinly veiled PR syndicators. NAPSI, for instance, will distribute your release (in the form of an editorial featurette) verbatim or they offer the service to rewrite a variation. NEWSUSA will syndicate your content for money as well.

What happens is that since these news sites you list are major local news hubs for rather small regions, even if they are getting duplicate content or other penalties, they're still ranking far above other local sites which helps maintain their impact; at least my assumption dictates.

If you don't want to go the paid route, consider writing blogs (vanilla suggestion, I know) and then contacting and building naturally relationships with these smaller news outlets who are obviously hungry for content. These syndication sites are just middlemen. Doing the work yourself also means avoiding duplicate content.

[realityhack]

ALorenzon is correct. Press Release Syndication should be used only for actual press releases, or seriously newsworthy things that might get picked up by more serious channels, like something that would be worthy of 3 inches in the NY Times.

So your competitor has a bunch of back links from spamy PR syndication sites. That doesn't mean replicating their strategy is how you get ahead. If you try to beat starbucks by copying everything they do... you will loose. But there are lots of local coffee houses. Same with SEO, some things should be copied, others... do something different.

[tstolber]

Also bear in mind if you went to Google to check the back links you only got a small portion and snippet of the links that actually go to that site. This has been the case for some time and was implemented so that back engineering of their algorithm is made much more difficult.

[costica]

Hi,

First, thank you for the replies to all of you. The duplicate content issue is interesting, because in this case, it is not being penalized.

Yes, I'll keep studying.

Second, thank you for the real forum with real folks with real SEO answers. I created an account on another site that came just above or below this one in Google for " seo forums" and it was spammer's paradise.

Regards,
Costica

[costica]

Also bear in mind if you went to Google to check the back links you only got a small portion and snippet of the links that actually go to that site. This has been the case for some time and was implemented so that back engineering of their algorithm is made much more difficult.

Interesting. I had not come across that. I assume that is a limitation for any SEO tool. Not just a limitation when one's searching google for "link:forums.seochat.com."