Article Syndication is still a great way to get your name out there, and attract targeted traffic that converts like crazy. The ‘bricks and mortar’ analyogy of article syndication is having a syndicated column in a newspaper. Regular content is published that is of interest to a target group. Over time a loyal following is built up.
In the past, it was also great way to get one-way links and increase your ranking. On very low and low-ish competition keywords, article syndication works just fine, even if the articles aren’t sydicated widely. Which I still think it helps, together with a well rounded linking campaign, it just isn’t helping as much. And I suspect, may actually be hurting.
Hundreds of links from low grade Article Syndication sites can’t be good news to Google. I recently saw several client sites who had installed Article Dashboard software downgraded to a grey PR and other sites linking heavily to them appear to be penalized as well. The sites weren’t ranked well to begin with, so it is difficult to say how much there were penalized.
Once the Article Dashboard software was removed, the PR returned on the last update. The sites linking heavily to the penalized site stayed at #135 (down from #3) for the targetted keywords. Once the links to the penalized site were removed, the rankings bounced back to #5 on the last update.
Quality counts more than ever! Here are some guildelines for article submissions:
1) Make sure the front page is in the google cache.
2) Check the ‘retrieved on’ date to see how active Google sees the site. Google appears to be skipping directores and web pages that are duplicate content. Which makes sense for them, since it is less work.
3) How many articles and authors? If a site has over 100,000 articles (ie the main article dashboard site www.articledashboard.com) Google isn’t going to penalize it, even if they are ‘getting links to increase PR etc. etc.’ They are too big now.
4) Traffic. Check Alexa. Anything under 20,000 is good.
Any suggestions? Experience?
