Alexa Rank and Linking from Article sites.

[applesofgold]

We are creating unique content and submitting our articles to article sites. I have some questions about the best way to go about this.

1. We are being very careful to create unique content for each submission - so we are not submitting the same article to multiple sites. Each submission is unique, so 1 article per 1 article directory.

2. When I did my research about these article sites at Alexa.com, I noticed that a lot of the article sites are ranking very well globally, but that a lot of them are #1 in Alexa for India. They are still ranked for other countries with very top ranking, for example, they may 9,000 Alexa rank in India and then 18,000 in the U.S. which is still very high.

3. We are trying to reach U.S. customers mostly, so I am wondering if we are still getting value by linking to these sites who have global reach (even though they are ranked best for India).

I would think that this is very beneficial still, but I didn't want to get the wrong kind of traffic by getting links from sites that are primarily getting their traffic from India, even though they are also getting tons of traffic from the U.S. - I am assuming this is OK because a 18,000 or 19,000 Alexa Rank in the U.S. is still excellent and I will benefit by this. But I wanted to be sure.

Feedback?

[jeffreytrull1]

Have you considered using the Mozrank instead of Alexa? This might be a better metric, plus it's easy to see if you use the MozBar extension for your browser. I definitely recommend this instead if you're attempt to obtain links for SEO value on any site (not just limited to article sites).

I'm not sure I would recommend article marketing for traffic like you're going after. Creating great content on your own site or guest posting on related industry blogs will almost certainly be a better strategy than submitting to general article sites.

[Ecreativeworks]

I would not use Alexa as your basis for evaluating site strength -- in my experience Alexa numbers are not only wildly innacurate, they're not even useful qualitatively. For example, one site I own gets about 17k visits per day. It has an alexa rank of 33,000 in the US. Another site I work on gets about 100 visits per day. It has an alexa rank of 32,000.

The two sites are miles apart, but Alexa not only doesn't see that, but actually misjudges which is more popular. This is true again and again with Alexa rankings. I imagine the problem is with the incredibly small sample set of toolbars users, combined with the fact that there's probably some niche bias among the users.

MozRank or MozTrust are both far better metrics for the SEO benefit of a link (as is just searching for various keywords and seeing if the directory actually ranks -- which I'll bet it doesn't, being an article directory). I haven't yet seen a good 3rd party source for the actual traffic of a site.

[applesofgold]

Jeffrey,

Thanks for the suggestion. Where do I get the Mozrank extension and does it work w/ Firefox?

What is wrong with article sites if they have PR4-7 and the content submitted is unique? We are seeing tangible results so far. We also do daily blogs and content on our own site.

[applesofgold]

Jeffrey,

Thanks for the suggestion. Where do I get the Mozrank extension and does it work w/ Firefox?

What is wrong with article sites if they have PR4-7 and the content submitted is unique? We are seeing tangible results so far. We also do daily blogs and content on our own site.

[applesofgold]

Thanks for the info, Julie. I'll look into MozRank - but the question remains in terms of sites that have strong traffic from countries like India. Is it bad to get links from these sites even if they also rank in the U.S.? My experience has shown that these sites have so far helped, since they have strong presence globally, even if the majority is from India, they also seem to have strong share in other countries as well. Any thoughts on that?

[jeffreytrull1]

Yes, it is compatible with both Firefox and Chrome. You can find it here: http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar

I'm not sure we're distinguishing between traffic from the article sites and traffic from Google search. Are you looking to bring visitors directly from the article sites or are you looking to increase your search rankings?

[applesofgold]

I'm just looking to increase search rankings in this instance. I'm doing so by providing quality and unique content to article sites with a link back to our site.

[jeffreytrull1]

Got ya. I misunderstood from the original post. In that case, there's nothing wrong with what you're doing, and it's a fairly popular method for building links (although there's a bit of an ongoing debate about using this method).

Best of luck!

[JamesNorquay]

Alexa is not the best way to track a website, it only looks at people who use the alexa tool bar, it is evident that many indian webmasters are using it.

I would look at OSE data for the domain, PR, how many pages and most importantly check out other articles on the site too see the pages it is going on...

[applesofgold]

thanks for the input. I agree it's a good method. why I think there has been debate also is that people usually submit the same article to hundreds of sites or dozens of sites. Someone alerted me to the fact that it's better to write 1 unique article per site and not to submit it elsewhere. that seems to be working so far, because it's good original content.

[applesofgold]

Hi, James, that's what most people are telling me about Alexa. But I still have not had a single answer about the India question which was my main concern. thank you.

[imageworks-261290]

Why wouldn't you submit to multiple high ranking content directories sites? If a few pick you up great....

Are you worried of a dupe content penalty? Are you using C tags to avoid this?