So I read an article recently comparing three article syndication services and found this to be quite interesting given that I personally use two out of the three services discussed.

The Article Marketing Deathmatch post was written by Michelle Macphearson, and you can read all about the test she ran here.

The three services Michelle tested were Build My Rank (BMR), Unique Article Wizard (UAW) and Article Samurai (AS). If you haven’t heard about Article Samurai before then you’ll probably be more familiar with their keyword research and SEO tool Market Samurai, which has been around for years.

Michelle basically took three pages from three different domains and ran article syndication through each system and pointed links back to each domain. Build My Rank linked to page 1, Unique Article Wizard linked back to page 2 and Article Samurai linked back to page 3. There was no cross linking from each system.

The whole reason for this test was to find out which articles Michelle and her team were syndicating were actually giving back any decent SEO benefits. Up until now she was just syndicating articles into these various systems, very much like I do, on a monthly basis without giving much thought as to what articles were doing what.

Michelle then tracked the links via Majestic SEO and SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer to see which links were actually been found and which were actually sticking.

The settings used throughout the syndication process were set to your normal submit so many a day, randomly. Not one of the submissions was set to build all the articles at once.

The key difference was that Build My Rank had the least amount of posts sent through their system with only twenty posts been created. Unique Article Wizard had over 100 and Article Samurai, she couldn’t set as the tool determines the submission rate.

And The Winner Is…?

After two months Michelle reviewed the syndications and found that Build My Rank had the most amount of links which had been picked up by Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer. Both Unique Article Wizard and Article Samurai both didn’t even have half as many. From these results she announced BUILD MY RANK as the clear winner of this Article Marketing Deathmatch.

The reason why Build My Rank won this test was because they not only submit your content into their blog network; they also work to get your links indexed. whereas both Unique Article Wizard and Article Samurai just submit your content and build you the backlink they do nothing to get the URL’s of the submission indexed in the Search Engines.

The way Build My Rank gets your links indexed is through Social Bookmarking and RSS Feed submission. Here’s a clearer diagram taken from the Build My Rank website which explains the process:

So basically to write the article, submit it into the Build My Rank system and then the guys behind the scenes at Build My Rank review and submit your content, then they build social bookmarking and RSS Feed links to your submission. Because these Social Bookmarking sites and RSS Feed Aggregators get crawled so often by the Google bots your links get found and picked up by Google a lot quicker.

Now if Michelle checked these links again in another couple of months she would more than likely find more links from the Unique Article Wizard and Article Samurai syndications had been picked up by the Search Engines however leaving them to be found on their own will take a lot longer than if you were to help Google find them.

This Is Why Article Marketing May Not Be Working For You!

With article syndication it’s just as important to get the URL’s of your submissions indexed by Google than it is to actually build them. If they don’t get indexed then the links you spend so much time building won’t give you any of the juice you’d expect from the high Page Ranked domains you plant them on.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, article samurai, build my rank, link building, unique article wizard

Finding relevant and related sites in your niche should be your top priority as it’s not only the best way for you to build links it’s also a great way to drive targeted traffic to any website or blog.

Google is now clamping down on link spamming which once upon a time work perfectly well for achieving high search engine rankings. However Google’s algorithm is now so advanced that it can easily detect link spam and it’s only getting better at doing this each and every day.

Link spamming is basically just getting backlinks from any website where it is possible to place a link and relevancy is never considered. This included practices such as:

Mass Blog Commenting:

Every blog has the function to be able to allow the blog owner to allow their subscribers to make comments on any post that they make. The person leaving the comment can place links either by entering a name in the ‘name section’ along with a URL in the ‘URL section’ where the name would become the link or they could use custom HTML or BBC code inside the actual comment itself.

The problem arose where some people would use automated software to find blogs with open comments and automatically build links. This system allowed spammy webmaster to build thousands upon thousands of backlinks to their websites.

Mass Forum Profile Creation:

Forum profile building is basically when you sign up with a forum and build your personal profile. Inside this profile you can leave a URL or an anchor text link or even both.

Again like with the guys doing mass blog commenting there is software available to help to automate the process of finding forums, creating accounts and then building the profiles. Some forum software can even go as far as to actually creating threads and reply to posts which is another way you can leave a link on a forum.

Social Bookmarking:

Social bookmarking sites are another group or type of site you can leave a link on. Again there are automated tools out there to save the manual labour of creating 100′s of social bookmarks. However these, like any other form of link spamming, are now discounted a lot less in the eyes of Google.

Article Marketing:

This method involves writing an article and then submitting it to as many article directories as you can find. The problem with this is that it takes a lot of time to make all the submissions and submitting the same article to many different article directories doesn’t do much these days for SEO as it hits Google’s duplicate content penalty.

Again software is available to automate this process. The software used for article marketing allows the link spammer to write a seed article and then spin the text within the article. The software then takes the spun article and generates hundreds of unique versions of the seed article and submits one version to each article directory.

The spinning functionality inside the software allows you to spin on a paragraph, sentence, phrase and even word level. The more variation you add to your spinning the more unique each version of each generated article will be.

Why Do These Tactics No Longer Work?

The problem with these methods is that Google’s algorithm can detect this type of behaviour. So although it’s great building all these links it does nothing these days for your SEO except put your site in the mythical Google Sandbox, which seems to be less mythical as time goes on.

These are just a few and there are many other link spamming methods used and all these methods would probably still be effective today if it weren’t for two types of link spammer:

1) the greedy link spammer, this guy would build thousands of links within hours and to anyone looking at their link velocity would wonder how in the World they achieved such a feat.

2) the naive link spammer, this guy would know a bit about SEO and why you would need to build these types of links however they would go out in the same way as the greedy link spammer and aimlessly build blog comments forum profiles and social bookmarks without worrying about how things would be perceived by the search engines.

So What Actually Works?

Guest Posting:

The way to build links and what’s been proven to work time and time again is ‘Guest Posting.’ Guest posting is where you would contact relevant blogs in your niche and provide a piece of useful and unique content in exchange for being allowed to post links inside the actual content.

The most effective way of finding relevant blogs in your niche is to use the following advance search operators in the Google search box:

1) keyword phrase inurl:blog

This advanced search operator is looking at pages within the Google index which have the keyword phrase somewhere on the page and that have the word blog in the URL of the site.

2) keyword phrase +guest post

This advanced search operator is looking at pages within the Google index which have the keyword phrase and the term guest post somewhere on the page.

3) keyword phrase intitle:guest post

This advanced search operator is looking at pages within the Google index which have the keyword phrase somewhere on the page and in the page META title have the term guest post.

How to Build Links:

With link building you have to think about two main aspects the amount of links you build over a set time period also known as Link Velocity and the amount of unique IP addresses which link to your website or blog also known as Linking Domains.

Ideally you should be building links in as much of a natural fashion as possible and to build too many links in a short space of time looks very unnatural. Also having lots of links from the same domain IP addresses looks very unnatural too.

The way you build links is in a gradual manner and once your site has gained a bit of age and has built up some authority within Google the more links you’ll be able to build in a shorter space of time. If you build too many links for a new or very young website and Google picks up on this then your site is going to have a very short time at the top of the search results.

Guest posting does take a little longer to do and there is more work however this is definitely the future of link building. The links you build via guest posts will stick around a lot longer than any blog comment, forum profile, social bookmark or article resource link.

And as much as Google’s algorithm updates continue to change the way they view sites within their search results having lots of unique guest posts from many unique IP addresses which have gradually being built over time will help to keep you on page one of Google.