We all know that article syndication and directory submissions are the staple diet of some cheaper SEO companies, and most of us know that both techniques are somewhat outdated and devalued.
However a lot of people still do article syndication. In fact I do it myself. While they are not the best links for the time being it does not look like they will get me penalised unlike many other link building techniques. A lot of SEOs even recommend it still, I recently downloaded the link building 101 PDF from Prospectmx.com. It is quite a nice chart of the various link building techniques, it will make a handy reference for people learning the trade. In this PDF they say that while article syndication is not that effective it is still worth doing 5 - 10 articles a month submitted to several good article directories such as:
- ArticleCity.com
- Buzzle.com
- EzineArticles com
- Articlebiz.com
- EasyArticles.com
Now even though I still do it to some extent the problem I have is that it is either done cheap and nastily or it really is not an efficient use of time.
The first option is to pay some foreigner to write the article for $5-$10 and then submit to the above sites. However this is the technique that most decent SEOs cringe at and it is really not recommended.
The correct way to approach this technique would be to write a decent quality article about the niche that you would like to link too. If it is for a client it is probably safe to say it is not a niche that you can just churn out interesting information from the top of your head. So therefore the will be at least a small amount of research required for this.
So lets say I produced 5 articles in 1 month for an interior design company I would estimate it would take at least 2 hours* for a 500+ word article if we included research. So that is 10 hours worth of work.
Then if we submit these articles to directories I would guess it is at least 2 mins per article per directory. It shouldn’t take long but you need to scan over the article and make sure everything is laid out properly, you also need to get the correct category, keywords, author box etc. Therefore 5 Articles * 5 Website’s * 2 mins = 50 minutes. Call it 1 hour.
That is 11 hours work so far. Now if we really want to make the most from our links ideally we really need to record each article per website so that each article is unique and not completely duplicate. Therefore I would estimate that reworking / rewording 1 article into 5 unique articles would take around an hour per article. This therefore you could add another 5 hours to the job.
In total (a very rough guess) I would guess that is 16 hours worth of work. Now if your an SEO company charging for your time that can be quite a lot of money to the client. 2 days worth of work (16 hours) can easily cost £600 - £1200 + worth of work, which I would say is a rip off if the SEO company had only syndicated 5 articles.
I personally think even a less experience SEO would achieve much better results spending that 16 hours of time on the site creating excellent content that generates links. It also can help improve the long tail rankings for your site if you have lots of relevant unique content on individual pages. If this content is added to a blog it is also very easy to syndicate this content via the RSS feed to build up your links this way. You can also easily syndicate this content on various hubs such as Squidoo or Hub Pages, though I am not sure how much value Google would give the links within this syndicated content.
If you still feel the need to syndicate articles then possibly the best option would be to reduce the number of articles, lets say to 1 or 2 but make them great. Then use these articles on your blog to create your great content. Let Google index it, maybe use social bookmarks and social media (though digging, or whatever, your own content is a bit lame) to drive some traffic and links. Then heavily rework the articles, maybe just re-write the whole article but on the same subject area so at least the research is already done, and finally submit to the quality directories. It may still be time intensive but it should provide better results than generic article syndication. I may also be inclined to only create a couple of versions of the article rather than 5 and submit them to 2 good directories. Then next month use 2 different directories, at least then you are getting links from separate domains.
*It could be less, but it could be a lot more, I am awful for not tracking time.
