A few signs that article syndication is becoming more mainstream as a link building method:
- new article banks are popping up left and right
- I’ve seen a lot more posts on webmaster forums on article syndication
This thread from SEOChat introduced me to a pretty comprehensive article submission list.
If you are promoting multiple sites, it’s a good idea to come up with a
good article submission list; if you do, each 500 word article that you
have written can provide you with over 50 relevant, permanent backlinks. Not a bad deal.
So you’ve all probably heard about TrustRank by now, and if you read SEO Book, you know that it could possibly screw low quality directories (i.e., 95% of them), making the links they hand out worthless.
Meanwhile, it appears the Google may be publicly taking some steps to combat spammy link building via directories. From Threadwatch:
According to the members at the DP forums, several directory categories in high profile sites such as Dmoz and Yahoo have been blanked out of PageRank. We’ve talked in the past about Google targeting directory sites for various reasons, but this time it comes with a twist, cutting off PR at major sources. Those blanked out categories include…
Dmoz: Computers – Internet – Searching – Directories
Google – Computers – Internet – Searching – Directories
Yahoo – Computers & Internet – Internet – WWW – Search engines & Directories
Personally I am surprised they would combat spammy directory links this way (if in fact it is what they are doing). Why wouldn’t they just greybar obviously SEO-inspired directories, or make the links from them worthless?
The New York Time’s announcement that they would be moving to a partly subscription-based model didn’t surprise me at all.
Of course, the move ticked many bloggers off; Nick W at Threadwatch wrote “Stupid, Stupid, Stupid”
in his headline for the story. When people are used to getting
something for free, and then are asked to pay for it, it is only
natural that they would be unhappy.
But the Times reasoning made sense to me (see their full explanation here, subscription required):
Mr. Sulzberger said that while some Internet users accustomed to free content might not be willing to pay, many others would be attracted by the online package of columnists, archives and other material.
“The advertising growth on the Web has been just spectacular the last few years,” he said. “But like any business, it’s going to mature over time, and when that happens, it will flatten and then you’ll get into the normal cycles just like we do it on print. And at that point you’re really going to need to have another revenue model.”
Internet advertising has seen a huge boom since the advent of pay per click, and I expect that it will see some more growth before it declines. Advertising is notoriously cyclical though, and there will be a point in time when internet ad-buying takes a dip. At that point, those publications who have diversified their revenue streams will be sitting
pretty.
Furthermore, in terms of SEO and linkability, the majority of content at NYT will still be available free of charge, and bloggers and webmasters will continue to link to it. Really what this is is a form of market segmentation: for those users who aren’t willing to pay for content, NYT puts most of it out in the open. They then obtain subscription revenue from the “diehard 5%” who are willing to pay for the extras.
In my not-so-humble opinion this is a smart hybrid business model that has proven itself over time. For proof, see SEW or WMW 
Google has amassed quite a bit of user behavior data with the Google Toolbar, and the Web Accelerator will only increase their vast knowledge of surfers’ habits. I would be willing to bet the farm that this will drastically impact their search algorithm soon.
For instance, suppose we’re looking at two Web sites that rank for “blue widget”. Site A has 500 higher quality backlinks from related sites. Site B has 40,000 lower quality backlinks obtained by spamming blogs. In the past, these two sites might have obtained similar positions in the SERPs.
But with data collected from the Web Accelerator and toolbar, Google knows that visitors to Site A tend to stay for 3:41 and view about 4 pages, while visitors to Site B stay for 0:31 and view 1.3 pages. Further, Google knows which of each site’s backlinks are being clicked, and which are never clicked by users (hint: the spammy blog comments are rarely clicked on).
When Google fully integrates user behavior data into their algorithm, sites with HQ content and HQ, highly trafficked links will benefit.
DaveN said something similar on this post at SEW Forums:
the way SE’s look at links is changing and changing fast imo If you can ask yourself will this link i have just added get traffic from people visiting that site, then you are on the right tracks if the answer is Yes.
Getting HQ links seems to be the theme of our blog in its initial days 
In case you missed this thread over at Search Engine Watch Forums, press release spam has gone mainstream. I’ve noticed dubious releases in sites like PRWeb for years, but I think it’s safe to say that the problem has gotten worse.
Bob Gladstein highlighted this point with a press release he got syndicated as a bit of a joke. Excerpt (italics added):
Experiments for the week included an attempt to determine the efficacy of the use of search engine submission forms and a study of the attention spans of editors working for online press release services.
In other news, Gonga and Maya continue to enjoy their birthday gifts, and this has significantly decreased the amount of work getting accomplished in the office.
I think this little experiment proves that press release services need to increase quality standards. The way things are now, even terrible press releases with grammatical errors get into Google News (this doesn’t happen through PRWeb, where you need $30 to get into eMediawire, but there are other press release services that get a release into Google News for free).
An SEO’d press release can be a helpful link building tool, though, as it provides a backlink from a contextually relevant page. It can also drive heavy traffic if it gets syndicated in Yahoo! News or Google News. The bottom line: we should all use press release services to get targetted links and traffic, but if abuse continues, the usefulness of this marketing method will decline.
Eric Ward is one of the most respected experts on linking on the Web. His latest article is a good read and one that I think highlights what a good link building strategy should be:
Every web site has its own universe of inbound links it can reasonably expect to come about from a passive approach. But you can’t just sit back and wait for a webmaster somewhere to happen upon your site and link to it. The key is to be strategically active, rather than randomly active.
This isn’t referring to an approach that requires 1000 reciprocal links on your site, or buying links from 50 “SEO-spam-directory-listing.com” type Web sites. Instead, think about where you could be linked from sites in, or related to, your industry. This will likely not require money, but instead, will require time.
As search engine link algorithms improve, quality links will perform much better than reciprocal or spam directory links. Any possible algorithmic feature-whether Hilltop, TrustRank, “the sandbox” or VIPS-will reward HQ links over spammy links. And if you have a long term SEO strategy, that fact should dominate your link building strategy going
forward.
Read more: Linking’s Holy Grail: The
Passively-Obtained Backlink
