Most Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts agree
that links back to your site have a great impact on
your ranking in the major search engines. Think of
it like an election; your site is a candidate and
every link to your site is a vote. Of course, it was
never quite that simple (high ranking, relevant sites
have more voting power) but now it may have gotten
even more complicated.
The Dampening Link Filter
It seems that Google may have introduced something
called a “Dampening Link Filter” into
its indexing algorithm. I’ll give you a layperson’s
overview of this filter, but for more intimate details,
check out WebProNews.
More and more people are realising the importance
of links back to your site (or “backlinks”).
For some time, companies have been engaging in all
sorts of link campaigns designed to generate thousands
of backlinks. Many of these campaigns haven’t
really paid too much attention to the context or lifespan
of these links. And Google knows it. Because these
campaigns are designed to artificially generate the
perception of a site’s importance – to
trick the search engines into thinking they’re
important – it’s been suggested that Google
has decided to put an end to it. Apparently, there’s
evidence to suggest that Google has introduced a new
link filter to dampen the effect of new backlinks.
So if your link generation campaign has just created
500 links in a day from seemingly irrelevant sites,
Google will suspect it of being artificial, and refuse
to pass on the full effect of those links –
at least for a while. Well, that’s how the theory
goes, anyway.
It has been argued that you can avoid being penalized
by this filter by generating links:
The wisdom of relevance and lifespan is already well
established; the dampening filter is simply one more
reason why people should start to heed it. Writing
and submitting SEO articles for online publication
is one way to do so.
This article explains how SEO articles satisfy each
of these three conditions. (For the basics of SEO
article writing, take a look at How to Top Google
by Writing Articles.)
Build Backlinks Slowly
Writing quality articles takes time. It’s as
simple as that. Even an SEO copywriter can’t
just bang an article together in a morning –
it has to be well considered. It must be accurate,
informative, interesting, well written, and topical.
And once you’ve written the article, the real
work begins. You then have to submit it to your favourite
article submit sites. And as they all have different
requirements and idiosyncrasies, submitting your article
to 50 submit sites can take you all day!
Once submitted, even the best articles will only
be published gradually. A good article can be published
2 or 3 times a day for a week or two, then interest
tapers off. But still, over the course of 6 months
a single good article can be published hundreds of
times! And remember, each time is a link.
Build Backlinks From Relevant Sites
As soon as you choose the topic of your article,
you define the type of site that will publish it.
All online publishers have an agenda; they want to
generate traffic. Whether for commercial or benevolent
reasons, they want particular kinds of articles for
very specific audiences. Your article won’t
be published on irrelevant sites simply because the
publishers of those sites get nothing out of it.
Of course, your article may be published on sites
that are only marginally relevant. For instance, this
article may be published on general copywriting websites,
advertising websites, web design websites, home business
websites, etc. But the beauty of a well written SEO
article is that you get to optimize it for the keywords
that you want to rank for. So even if the keywords
on the publishing site don’t quite match your
own target keywords, the page containing your link
(i.e. your article) does.
What’s more, you even have the power to optimize
the links themselves. For instance, as an SEO copywriter,
I can distribute backlinks throughout my article that
use my target keywords as the link text (e.g. copywriter,
SEO copywriter, advertising copywriter, and website
copywriter ;-). Some submit sites don’t let
you do this, but most will – at least in the
byline.
And one other thing – other people link to
good articles. This can increase the Page Rank of
the site containing your article, which, in turn,
can increase the page rank of your own site. It’s
a win-win situation!
Build Backlinks With a Long Lifespan
The quality of your SEO article determines the lifespan
of your backlink. Write a very helpful article, make
it easy to read, and choose a topic which isn’t
going to go away in a hurry, and your article will
stay online for years.
In any event, most publishers tend not to clear out
their article libraries simply because it’s
better for them to have lots of content available
to both readers and search engines.
Conclusion
While it’s no new phenomenon to SEO veterans
and SEO copywriters, the writing of SEO articles to
generate backlinks is a tactic which offers much in
the way of ranking. The possibility of a Google dampening
link filter simply increases the value of that offering.
Happy writing!
Article by Glenn Murray
Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter and website
copywriter and heads copywriting studio Divine Write.
He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at
glenn@divinewrite.com.
Visit http://www.divinewrite.com
for further details, more FREE articles, or to purchase
a list of article submit sites.
