It is no secret to anyone involved in SEO that content based link building solutions such as article distribution have been waning in the last two years. In fact many believe that the honeymoon is truly over and sluggish online directories are not worth the paper they are written on.

There has been much speculation over why this has happened by dismayed online marketers who have seen a valuable source of linking dry up. There are two main schools of thought on the matter; the duplicate content filter and the static distribution lists.

Everyone has heard of Google’s duplicate content filter, which screens content to ensure that it is not using valuable space on the same data. Some online marketers claim that the mass distribution of content to directories and publishers has lost linking power as the duplicate content filter has been changed.

This statement has a real Chinese whispers quality to it and it has been denied by several notable industry figures. The internet was devised as a place to share information, which means that by definition there will be duplicate content.

Publishers have been sharing duplicated content since the internet was invented so a mysterious change in the duplicate filter is a bit dubious. Google’s innovation was to have algorithms making relevant information available instantaneously; the process used to evaluate the relevancy of any one piece of information is based around the content.

This is traditionally done by linking. On a conceptual level, linking is basically stating that a page is worth checking out. The more relevant and higher quality the content is the more chance there is of people linking to it. This might seem obvious but content based linking can be massively overcomplicated, losing sight of the fundamentals.

The fact is that many SEO companies, especially smaller operations, have to take what business they can get, which means they have to take on clients who have little or no marketing resources to develop content. Sites under 100 pages are generally not going anywhere these days, so the client really has to put in the work.

Article marketing is still alive and well, however churning out rushed trash on ‘tubular piling’ or another obscure keyword destined for the standard distribution list of whatever distribution resources you choose is not going to cut it. Authoritative, consistent, unique content direct to Google News is the way to go.

Still distribute your content to other places, such as directories however it can be more effective to do the submission yourself as opposed to using services or automated software. It is time consuming however you have a greater level of control; it is also worth trying to re-write some of the article.

Automated Article spinning is cutting corners and with Google’s latent semantic indexing developments, I predict this to soon be the equivalent of spamming. There is not short cut to organic content linking strategies, fly by night solutions will burn out quickly.

It is all about building a keyword specific authoritative profile through a consistent stream of quality unique content. You can opt for outsourced services but use basic linking principals; rotate the anchor text and do not use one distribution list exclusively.

Relevant, quality, unique content will attract links. Too good to be true content solutions promising the earth will end up doing the opposite.

Dominic Donaldson is an expert in search engine marketing and how the services available can help with SERPS.

Article Source: ArticleSpan

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