Page 4 - Link building campaign

Dont take it too seriously, I was poking fun at a party line a number of people here come out with.

Its not about you, its about a whiter than white, SEO police mentality, which quotes matras and does not look at what techniques will be effective for a particular client in a particlauir circumstance.

I don't have an issue with what you are doing and would probably do it myself if I had the resource available, but it doesn't actually match up in my mind with party line you seem argue for.

You maybe got it in the ear because you suggsted that techniques that work for other people are 'crappy' and 'useless', and insinuating that guys who work in a different way to you are cowboys who rip people off. They exist in this business, but they are not the people you were talking to.

Yeah im quite happy to call its quits after this little tussle,and I have explained why I was ruder than I usually am.

I actually think an interesting point going forward is what constintutes ethics as an SEO operative?

Is it adherance to an number of abstract quality guidelines that define the way we do SEO?

Or is it a commitment to give maximim long term ROI for all of our clients, without doing damage to the internet or our profession.

Maybe on a different thread

I have never had a problem with kernels methods and think he is a very effective SEO opertaive from all the evidence shown.

I just objected to how he spoke about other peoples methods without giving thought to there circumstances, budgets, aims and requirements.

The rigidity of the thinking of many, the pat replies they give, and the false over simplistic answer that relate to where they are, not where the person asking the question is sometimes raise my ire.

Hey guys... Jeeeesssseee. I left this thread for 24 hours and it seemed to explode.

At any rate. Several of you requested that I post the URL to my blog post with the data I was describing earlier in the thread. I found the time-series study on my blog here from about a month ago:

http://hubshout.com/?Does-syndicati...elp-SEO&AID=164

Again - While not a true experiment, I think it qualifies as a psuedo experiment analyzed through the lens of time. This is data for a single ranking, for a single site, on a single keyword on the y-axis. Time is on the x-axis. I point out where the client got behind in their reviews and article syndication was halted while waiting for their approval of our writing. About 6 weeks later, they started approving content again and out it went. Seems to me the trend lines are fairly pronounced. But I just work here. LOL

I have another study that uses a cross-sectional approach to analyze data. That one is also interesting because it uses many different keywords in the analysis (whereas this one is a single keyword phrase). But it has limitations of not looking at things over time. No study is perfect. But these two together tell me that these links do count at least a bit. That was the original discussion here right?


DISCLAIMER: I asked permission before posting this link and people wanted to see it. Please no flaming me (at least for this - I'm sure you can find much better reasons LOL). See page 1 and 2 of this thread.

Man can you believe the cheek of some people? Blatant self promotion

It's hard being green LOL


P.S. The Time-Series study above is for a keyword phrase with the following level of difficulty:

2,630,000 results in Google with quotes.
5,330,000 results in Google without quotes.

Thought I should add that...

So am I correct in the conclusion I draw from this, that article syndication gives a short term boost but in the long term it is of very little value?

That is sort of like a Dr that prescribes blood pressure medication to a fat guy. Keep taking the meds and you'll be fine, stop taking it and it's a chest clutching death.

Instead of prescribing meds the Dr should just tell the guy to lose weight! But if he does that the guy will be healthy and stop being his patient! amirightamiright?

or did I miss the boat completely?

please be gentle, I don't mind being wrong

edited to add: cool study btw. kudos to you

The whole point here is your terminology. You said useless when that's not entirely true.

Extremely low value would do the trick!

The cool thing about data KernelPanic is that the data don't lie, but the conclusions are often in the eye of the beholder.... What you said is a possible conclusion. I think there are several other explanations also.

In a competitive space people are doing a ton of stuff to gain rankings because the budgets are large. I think this implies that you need to be consistent and not let-up your strategy. Consistency being a key. I think I saw a Matt Cutts interview once that said that sudden spikes in link counts are a typical signal of manipulation. Likewise, I would think that that fairly consistent link growth is a sign of stability. The downside to this is that you have to keep feeding the beast once you create the appetite. LOL

Who knows (other than the engineers at Google). I just thought this was cool data that I have not seen published in this fashion elsewhere. I also thought that people here might benefit from staring at it, thinking about it and reaching their own conclusions...

Looking very closely at the excellent data you provided in your study caused me to draw another conclusion that might make your case even stronger.

Notice the consistant creep towards better ranks over time until the syndication was paused?
#23 rank on 1/8
#22 rank 1/28
#21 rank on 4/1
#20 rank on 5/10
Can you draw any conclusions from that based on the dates the syndication took place?

If yes, and if your key phrase is very competitive, each syndication event allowed you to spike, and settle slightly higher in the serp.

Most excellent observations!! Thanks for your input... Yes - Staring at this data every day until my eyes fall out, yes I had noticed that before too....

My take is that things get VERY HOT AND HEAVY towards page 1 on a term with a few million results (with quotes). As such, you will naturally see deceleration as you approach the holy position!

Clients hate this. Especially if they have taken their ruler and extrapolated where they will be by the x-mass shopping season LOL !! I always have to warn them that there ARE no guarantees in SEO.

So your course of action is to publish the article on your site, then submit it for syndication, and link it from the body of the article to its page on your site?

How many syndication sites do you submit each articleto? Do you agree the good free ones are fine for this? ezine, articlesbase, submityourarticle....

edit: typo

This does fit with my experience on article submission, its alot of work for only a little gain.

I think you would get a bigger hit from a content network of well respect and known sites.

You also would get a bigger hit from a well executed paid linking campaign.

However for those that have not got the resources for the above, taking the time to write and publish some articles can get them some back links which may be enough for there niche.

I would agree with the finding that if your in a competitive niche its not the way to go, if you have better resources available its not the way to go.

But for those with little budget and no ready made network of sites, this is a way to start to develop your link profile.

Low quality directory submission and article submission, I believe, is associated with FFA. So there is a fine line between low value links and ffa low value links. When your site starts getting backlink profile consisting of a bunch of free for all garbage, in the end, it might just hurt.

When I first started out I religiously submitted to crappy directories and got several sites penalised.

Interesting post: http://www.seobook.com/archives/001544.shtml

Off site SEO caused a penalty?


(I have seen this also ((in social marketing))but am still working up the courage to say it out loud, don't tell anyone)

Really really interesting thread, lots of good points throughout the thread.

The old saying “Horses for courses" springs to mind.

I work in a niche and I have spent months and months looking and analyzing other competitors websites in my niche and close to my niche....

The top 4 ranking sites for the most competitive keywords have been around for between 6 to 9 years with good links pointing to them.

But I have been watching three websites over the last 6 months, there just over 1 year old and have only directory links or pr1 or pr2 links on link pages on other crappy looking sites in other fields which don’t have good link profiles, but these three sites rank on page 1 in Google for a few keywords.

Let’s say the sites are "blue widgets" services and they are based in London, all there links are from

"blue widgets directories"

"London based Directories"

"London Based websites”

There seems to be given a relevance given to these low value links and they ranking really well, I know things like this have been said here before many times, but thought I’d say it any way.

Point being there are other websites with better content and on paper better looking links I think, that are on page 2 and 3.

Can a relevance be given to these low value links, then increasing there value, I think so.