Question provided by Faraz Qureshi – an Ultra Light Startups member.
Answer provided by Dennis Yu CEO of BlitzLocal – and panelist at SEO for New Websites on Thursday, March 4.
Faraz’s Question:
Can anyone comment on the value (from SEO standpoint) of submitting blog posts to ‘article aggregation’ sites? For example, I’ve posted blog posts/articles to this site: http://ezinearticles.com/ but not really sure how much [SEO] value its adding. Any thoughts?
Dennis’s Answer:
The simple answer is that if sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Such is a nature of shortcuts to high rankings and “guaranteed #1 rankings”. Every year for the last 10 years, we’ve seen new versions of mass submission software, content “generation” (randomization) scripts, and outsourced SEO firms selling their wares.
The medium answer is that if Google or Bing can’t distinguish you from a spammer, then you’re guilty until proven innocent. So if a spammer can submit a ton of articles to ezinearticles or other directories, whether auto-generated or created by low wage people offshore, then you have no advantage. Search engines base rankings on linkjuice and trust– are you getting links from high authority sites. A cnn.com isn’t going to link to a spammer, so if you can get such high quality sites to “endorse” you by linking to your site, then that’s a massive trust signal.
Because you’re guilty until proven innocent, the strategy of relying solely upon having great content isn’t sufficient. I could have the best article about a particular topic put on a brand new domain and at the same time create some crappy article on wikipedia for the same topic—who do you think will win in the SERPS (search engine results pages)? At the same time, you can’t get links from high authority sites unless you do have great content. So if you place your great content on these article distribution sites, it’s not the direct linking value that matters, but the SECONDARY effect of actual humans reading your article, writing about it, and then linking to you from their sites.
The long answer is that search engines use a mix of signals to see who actually deserves to rank for a particular keyword. Imagine that– the goal of the artificial intelligence is to judge as accurately as if a human were choosing which pages among many should show up first. Forget SEO for a second– do you think your content deserves to outrank what’s already there? If your content sucks, then search engine trickery will get you only so far.
Ranking in search engines is like passing a lie detector test. Thus, two strategies– You can either be telling the truth or be an expert at lying. A lie detector measures dozens of signals– your pulse, blink rate, fluctuations in voice patterns, perspiration, and so forth– knowing that a liar can probably keep some signals in check, but not ALL of them. Likewise, if you want to rank in search and want to fake it, you can generate a natural looking page creation and link velocity, a natural looking mix of high quality and low quality sites linking to you, a natural looking keyword density or theming around certain topics, and so forth.
That’s why there’s been so much discussion about how to buy links in a way that doesn’t look spammy, create auto-generated content that isn’t quite duplicate content, create fake twitter profiles that look like they might just be human (“forgive my English, I am a foreign exchange student”), and so forth. With the explosion of social media– everyone generating content everywhere they go– the problem of surfacing the “right” search results is more like a needle in a haystack. Just too many pages to sift through– and they’re multiplying like nuts, especially as social networks make this information public by default.
If you already have a high power site (Google PageRank or SEOmoz mozRank 6 or higher), then you can play the Demand Media, Mahalo, or Patch.com strategy of barely human content that sits under a high power domain to flow down link juice.
If you have a great social site– stupid doggy tricks or other voyeuristic/humorous content– then you can send signals via actual traffic and mentions in social sites, even if those links don’t pass juice. Yes, the search engines use actual traffic and mentions in rankings, since a popular article created a couple years ago might have gotten 50 links, but that same article created today might get 5 links and 100 tweets.
So to answer your question, using article submissions may give you a slight boost, but cannot substitute for the core of great content and great promotion of the content. If you’re doing something a spammer can do, it’s probably not high value. If you think there’s a shortcut via software, you’re likely taking a huge risk, making someone else rich, or both.
To ask your own question of Ultra Light Startups experts, fill in this form on the Ultra Light Startups website and check the ULS blog or the ULS email newsletter for the answer.For more information on this and related topics, join us at SEO for New Websites in New York on March 4, 2010
Tagged as: seo
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