Distributing Content for One-Way Inbound Links

A time-honored way of getting one-way inbound links is to distribute content, usually articles, for other websites to publish in exchange for a backlink. Most often, the backlink is included in an "author's resource box," which is a brief "about the author" paragraph promoting the author's site.

If done right, content distribution can become your primary method of building links. To some extent, the links can even build themselves passively, with no further effort on your part. How? Webmasters can discover your available content either on your site or on a content clearinghouse website for months and even years after you first start a content distribution campaign.

Given the enormous value of distributing content for inbound links, the big question is: why isn't everybody doing it?

Myths about distributing content for inbound links

There is a surprising amount of ignorance about doing a content distribution linking campaign. Here are the three most common myths:

Myth 1: The "Duplicate content penalty."

Some webmasters worry that if the content on their sites is suddenly on hundreds of other sites, search engines will inflict a "duplicate content penalty." Why is this ridiculous?

• If this were true, every major newspaper and news portal website would now be de-indexed from the search engines, since they all carry "duplicate content" from the news wires such as Reuters and the Associated Press.
• Thousands of self-promoting internet gurus have proven that distributing content is an effective method of improving search engine rank.
• Even more thousands of content websites have proven that republishing this content does not carry any search engine penalty.
• True, the first website to publish an article often seems to be favored by search engines, ranking higher for the same content in searches than higher-PageRank pages with the same content. But the "duplicate" pages do show up in the search engine results, even if lower than the original site. Meanwhile, the reprint content has no effect on the ranking of a site's other pages.
• The only duplicate content penalty is for duplication of content across pages of a single website. Meanwhile, there is a sort of "copyright theft" penalty, whereby someone who copies content without permission can be manually removed from search engine indexes out of respect for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But that penalty is only for flagrant theft, not minor mistakes in attributing reprint content.

Myth 2: Distribution is for article clearinghouse websites only.

There are over 100 popular, high-traffic websites that act as clearinghouses for content made available for redistribution. These websites include isnare.com, amazines.com, and goarticles.com.

Many novice content-distributors are upset when the article clearinghouse websites, with tens of thousands of articles each with a backlink, pass negligible PageRank. But the point of distributing content to those websites is for other website owners to find your content and put it on their websites--not to get a backlink directly from the clearinghouse website (though this is sometimes an unexpected bonus).

Plus, to maximize PageRank-passing links, you also have to submit articles to website owners individually. It's not a small amount of work. But there's no substitute for a polite, individually crafted email recommending a website owner complement his or her existing articles with one you've written.

Myth 3: Any content will do.

• Fact: It should be obvious that many website owners, jealous of their link popularity, will only republish exceptionally high -quality content. For articles, this means a unique point of view and solid information that cannot be found just anywhere, ideally presented in compelling language in a web-optimized format by a professional published writer. You can conduct a content distribution campaign with bad content, but you'll be handicapping yourself from the start.
• Fact: A content distribution campaign requires skillful planning. The most likely relevant categories of websites to republish articles must be identified. Relevance of republishing websites has to be balanced against the number of potential republishing websites both when creating content to distribute and when targeting sites for distribution. For instance, our own article marketing campaigns target not just sites focusing on web content, but also broad categories of interest, such as: web design, webmaster issues, writing, marketing, business, website promotion, and SEO. To maximize success, articles have to be custom-written for each category, and refined for sub-categories such as accessible web design, affiliate webmaster issues, freelance writing, and web marketing.
• Fact: You need at least three different articles of varying lengths and focus to have a shot at targeting high-PageRank- websites effectively. Many experienced article marketers recommend having 25 or more articles on hand to maximize results.

Distinct non-SEO benefits of distributing content for inbound links

Content distribution in exchange for backlinks predates SEO. In

fact, for many content distributors, these non-SEO benefits are

the primary goals:

•  

   

  Traffic generation. More than any other method of getting links, the links in distributed content generate traffic. Distributing content gets you traffic even when it doesn't get you a link. If your article gets picked up by a large-circulation email newsletter, you will get a flood of highly qualified traffic.

• Authority. Distributing content is the only linking campaign method that can make the recipient website and its owners appear authoritative. There are thousands of internet gurus who owe their lucrative reputations entirely to the articles they've distributed.
• Mindshare. Distributing articles is the only linking campaign method that can help you spread an idea. This makes article distribution invaluable for launching new products or services.

Drawbacks of Content Distribution

Of course, nothing good ever came easy. Any website owners who are looking for SEO magic beans will be disappointed by content distribution:

• Results are variable. Content distribution is not quite as sure a thing as buying links. You cannot say for sure at the outset how much of an investment it will require to get X number of links with X PageRank. Of course, this variability is one reason why links from content distribution may appear less "artificial" to search engines.
• Requires significant investment. You need high-quality content, expertise in content distribution, and quite a few work-hours to distribute the content and track the results. These costs can be mitigated by outsourcing the entire process from soup to nuts to a content distribution specialist. Further, the cost has to be weighed against the cost of other link campaigns, which is also significant.
• Requires special expertise. There are numerous newbie pitfalls to distributing content, from improperly formatting articles to writing a bad introductory email to accompany content submissions. You generally have to have done numerous campaigns to truly get the feel for it. Again, this drawback can be mitigated by outsourcing your project to a specialist. And again, this requirement has to be weighed against the real-world requirement of special expertise in other link campaign methods.

In conclusion, there are a number of ways of getting one-way inbound links, and if you're smart, you'll use all of them. Still, there's only one method that carries substantial non-SEO benefits as well, and that's content distribution. I know, I know: focusing on content just feels like you're giving in to Google. But don't fight it. When it comes to getting high search engine rankings through content, you know you want it.