SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

Just checked my stats and found a surge in traffic from an article that was written several months ago (Secrets to Successful Blogging), got syndicated on a site picked up by Google News yesterday. The traffic surge continued till this evening when the news was refreshed again.

Article syndication has proven in this case to not only be excellent for SEO, but also for driving targeted traffic while at the same time building up online reputation.

Good articles can give your site visitors a “preview” of your company, products, and services by providing insight into your philosophy of doing business. When you syndicate well-written articles, they spread faster, wider, and tend to be picked up by large authority sites. When articles you write appear on relevant authority sites they build credibility in the reader’s mind by “transferance” from the authority site, in effect saying they like what they saw in your company.

If you still have marketed your site through articles, now is a good time to start. You can find tips to get started in my article distribution post or contact us for a custom quote.

A forum thread at WebmasterWorld discusses the potential for article links expiring after seeing a drop in backlinks from articles.

I noticed the same thing this week – but what I saw was *not* article links being “absent” from the backlink query but rather articles from crap and “out of the box” article directory sites being “absent”. All the articles on quality sites and in a small portion of the article directories (tended to be the more popular ones) were there. Most of the articles that were up on crap scraper sites who grabbed them *via* article directories were there too (i.e. not published on “article directories”).

It’s possible they’ve figured out a way to identify and disclude the crappier, or less useful/linked to/quality article directory sites. It’s also possible they aren’t showing as complete of a list of backlinks that they used to.

I covered article marketing and how anyone can gain quick syndication through good articles that in turn earn the website owner lots of free links from different sites.

Think about it from the search engines perspective: Do they really want to display a lot of links from sites displaying the same *exact* article, page after page? Of course not! Many article links will in fact, be discounted because they come from low quality sites. The search engines only want to count the most authoritative links. Authoritative articles links usually result from other quality sites pointing to the article being syndicated. If an article has a .edu, .gov, or .mil link pointing to it, it makes it even more powerful and worthy of being kept.

So, an article marketer maybe able to submit to hundreds of article sites but will find that only a small percentage of those linkbacks actually count after several months. This is nothing to be really concerned about and will continue to happen as more low quality and content scraper sites pop up.