A big boost from articles

A classic link-building strategy is writing articles for other websites that will allow you to put one or two links of your own into the page. Usually, these articles are published under a license that allows anyone else to re-publish the content on their own site, so long as all of the links are intact. This can then result in dozens (or hundreds) of links being created in a short amount of time. Even if search engines impose strict 'duplicate content' penalties, you'll at least get the benefit of having a link from whichever site republishes it with the highest Pagerank or SERPs.

Recently, one of my articles really set off a surge of traffic and a rush to the front-page of a highly contested set of search terms. The article didn't get republished 100 times, so why was this one different?

Well, the article was optimized for the same keywords as the website I was linking to. The article itself, on the EzineArticles domain, ended up ranking in the mid-30s on the search engine for the target search and so this gave a huge boost to my site.

Here's my plan now.

Take a broad 2-3 key word phrase. Break it down into five sub-topics. Submit articles with the following title format: "(keyword phrase): [subtopic1]"

This is definitely a stretch of creative writing, trying to come up with unique and useful content without straying too far from the original (keyword phrase). However, the effect so far is extreme.

Has anyone else found article directories that pack as much link juice as Ezine? Other above-board promotion strategies that result in large SERP jumps? Right now this is probably my favorite method of going up in the search engines, but its hard to write quality articles and not want to use them on my own site instead. (Its also not an appropriate venue to promote specific items for sale. afaik their TOS advises against anything like a sales-pitch)

Lemme know what you think, your advice, or any questions or whatever! I'd like to see the promotion section more active but I'm being careful to not be too self-promotional ;)

~
website building website building & discount coupons
my obligatory dreamhost coupon code

I've never submitted an article to any of those directories before... but I know what I'm going to be doing for the rest of tonight.

Your plan makes sense to me, especially since most crawlers put more emphasis on words that are bold or headings. I would just be concerned that people A. wouldn't actually link back to you or B. might slap on the rel="nofollow" attribute (jerks).

Also, can't it hurt your chances if people with non-related sites publish your article?

I had some problems with people not living up to the re-publish agreement by not adding the links or just being a jerk by putting 'no-follow' on them.

If they totally leave the links out, I've sent emails reminding them the terms they agreed to by republishing - so far everyone has added the links or taken down the article. If that hadn't worked, I would have just forwarded my original email to their webhost.

As far as no-follow, its not technically against the rules so I just make sure my article on Ezine is considered the original authority with a few social bookmarks. Ezine has high pagerank and they ping google and other search engines so I haven't had a problem with that anyway. To be honest, any time my articles get published all the copies end up in Google's supplemental index.

Now, there might be a problem with people modifying the content to promote topics Google doesn't like. Someone did actually do this to me in the last week or two since I originally posted this, and I noticed that the pages being linked to stayed at PR N/A after the last update!

I can't really tell if its a penalty, because the site those category pages are on isn't a very high PR to begin with and there are only 4 or 5 pages on the whole domain that have any PR. However, I did kind of expect the categories to rank well since they're linked on every page of the domain.

Google says backlinks can't hurt your site - or we'd all just make links for our competition from "bad" sites. But I'm not completely sure in this case - because I really did think those category pages would get at least PR1.

~
my obligatory dreamhost coupon