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Article Syndication

September 19th, 2006 | Category: Article Submission

Article Syndication

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.

While featuring your articles on your site is a great way to attract incoming links, the real value comes when you distribute those articles to other sites in exchange for a link back to your own. There’s a huge thirst for articles out there, and it’s incredibly easy to find sites eager to reprint your original articles. As it turns out, many sites are aware that placing compelling content on their sites is a great way to build incoming links. However, most people still haven’t realized the enormous link-building advantage that comes from having unique content that can be syndicated to all those other sites in exchange for a link back.

Reciprical links and article syndication

In our Reciprical Links Tutorial we discussed techniques for finding sites that would make good reciprocal link partners.  However, as we have mentioned before reciprocal links are second class links and that the real link building benefit came from getting one-way links that don’t require a link back.  Well, given that is the case, it makes much more sense to swap an article for a link, then a link for a link. In other words, if you have original articles and content to offer, you can contact every site on your list of potential reciprocal link partners and, instead of begging for reciprocal links, offer them the opportunity to reprint one of your articles on their site in exchange for a link back to your site. Your link will typically be placed in the author bio or signature at the bottom of the article. Bear in mind that these articles are not sales letters. They’re informative content. Trying to sell too hard without providing anything of real value will just turn people off.

Other authors
Another great way to locate sites that are interested in reprinting your articles is to find authors within your industry who are currently syndicating their articles on other sites. Once you’ve found an author, searching for that author’s name is likely to reveal where else their articles are being reprinted. This will give you a quick-list of sites to contact to get your own articles reprinted.

Dealing with duplicate content issues
While syndicating your articles to other sites is a great way to build links, it’s possible for problems to arise if you’re also planning to feature those same articles on your own site. Often, if multiple pages feature the same content, search engines will attempt to show only one of those pages for a given keyword search.  It can be difficult to control who a search engine considers the original source for an article. Usually, it’s the page where the article was first indexed by Google, but not always. Sometimes it’s the page with the most incoming links. Other times we are at a loss to explain why Google is showing one site’s version of an article but not another’s. 

One solution to this problem is that you can let a site republish only part of an article, rather than the whole piece. That makes your version look unique to the search engines and reduces the chance of a duplicate content penalty. In addition, it lends itself to making your site the more valuable source to readers, since you’re the one with the complete version.

Make sure you get your link
Be sure to require that anyone who republishes your articles provides a ‘republished with permission of …’ tag-line along with copyright info and a link back to your site.  And be prepared to monitor these sites to ensure that they’re doing as you request. It’s also a good idea to periodically search for unique phrases within each article to locate unauthorized reprints within the search results.  By the way, Google Alerts works well in that regard, as does Copyscape.

Of course, if someone steals your copyrighted content, you can file a DMCA complaint on them and get them removed from the major search engines.

Article Directories
Not surprisingly, there’s a fast, easy way to go about getting your articles out there, and a slower, more methodical way of doing it. The fast way will get you lots of links in a hurry, but they’re more likely to be low quality links that will provide less of a search engine benefit—in some cases they may even hurt your efforts to improve your search rank.  On the other hand, the methodical way requires a deep understanding of your industry, learning who the key players are, and developing relationships with them that will get your articles placed on their sites.  Getting your articles on the right sites gives you the credibility and perception of expertise that you can’t otherwise get through placing your articles on lots of low-quality sites.

However, the methodical approach can also be time consuming and challenging. Sometimes you just want lots of links, and quick. If so, article directories are for you. Probably the best article directory to get started with is Ezine Articles. This site allows you to submit up to 10 articles for free, after which there is a small charge for each additional article you submit (if your articles are especially good, you may qualify for Expert Author status, where you’ll be allowed to continue submitting articles for free). Ezine Articles may then syndicate these articles out to other sites. This means you get one link from the article directory, and you can expect to pick up additional links if your article gets syndicated.

There are literally hundreds of article directories you can submit to, but it’s best just to limit your submissions to the top 5 - 10 directories. Here’s why.  If all your links are coming from article directories only, they’ll look a bit contrived to search engines. Therefore, we advise you to limit your links from article directories to less than 10% of your overall linking mix.

Here’s a list of some of the top article directories that accept submissions:

Articles submitted to article directories should be fairly short (about 600 words or so). It also helps if they’re presented in a way that makes them easy or entertaining to read. Good titles might look like, “10 Steps to …” or “The Top Ten Ways You Can…” or “The 7 Most Common Mistakes That …”. People love to read lists. It breaks the information up into easily digestible pieces. By the way, the title is often the most important part of getting an article syndicated. Beyond the eye-catching title, articles about interesting topics or controversial stances on conventional topics are more likely to get read and syndicated out to other sites. Having a good writer on staff can really help in that regard.

Avoid Spreading Your Articles Too Thin
One problem with syndicating your articles out to lots of sites and directories is that you may find it harder to get them printed on the more important sites. Typically, the sites with higher traffic are considered more authoritative than others and, ideally, that’s precisely where you want your articles to appear. However, you may find that such sites are only interested in exclusive content that hasn’t been previously featured elsewhere. Usually, an agreement can be worked out where such sites receive exclusive rights for the first month or so that your article is online. After that, you can shop it around to directories and other sites. This strategy can give you the best of both worlds.

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This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.

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