Is article syndication still a safe & effective method of link building?

[David_Veldt]

Hello,

We have an SEO agency pushing to implement article syndication as a method of link building. They claim to only target industry-relevant, high authority sources. I am very skeptical of this tactic but they are a fairly reputable agency and claim this is safe and works for their other clients.

They sent a broadly written (but not trash) article, as well as a short list of places they would syndicate the article on, such as issuu.com and scribd.com. These are high authority sites and I don't believe I've heard of any algo updates targeting them.

Regarding linking, they said they usually put them in article descriptions and company bylines, using branded exact and partial matches; so the anchor text contains exact or partial keywords but also contains our brand name. Lately, I have been under the impression that the only "safe" links that have been manually built, such as these, should be either branded or simply your site's URL.

Does anyone still use article syndication as a form of link building with success? Do you see any red flags here?

Thanks!

[Charlessipe]

I would be skeptical too. It doesn't seem like a good long term tactic because the websites are not linking to you editorially. Article syndication is typically considered to be a placed link, which Google doesn't seem to value as much as an editorial recommendation.

Here's a video from Matt Cutts from Google about article marketing which sounds similar to what is being proposed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5xP-pTmlpY

"Honesty I'm not a huge fan of article marketing..These are not as much editorial links where someone is really making a choice this is a great site...I would probably lean away from that."

The exception is if the article is syndicated on a highly trusted publication like a Forbes.com or Huffington Post in which case the links are trusted and seen as valuable endorsements.

[Chris.Menke]

David,

Something that you can be sure of is that links like that are going to be of less and less value to your site in the future. So, even if, in fact,  it's "safe and works for their other clients", I think we all understand that it's not Google's intention that such links will always carry the value they do now or once had.  While it may not incur any penalty at this time, their value to your site may be dubious and thus the value of such a service for company may be as well.

What is the value of those links? It might all just boil down to the question: Are you getting what you paid for?--and I think that's what you're asking.  But, unless you're willing to tell us the price you're paying for the service, it's hard to give you an answer.  On the other hand, you could go to top-tier content publicist and get a quote from them and see how such pricing fits within your marketing budget philosophy. These days, the more editorially-given a link appears to be to Google, the greater its value.  As you scale down from that, the cost for acquiring them should be less and less.

Your company's link building is a trajectory based on how quickly it wants/needs visibility, how much visibility it wants/needs, its budget for this type of marketing, as well as its knowledge/understanding of this type of marketing.  Faster, shorter-term trajectories targeting relatively small markets are on one end of the scale and do have their place. Slower, long-term trajectories are on the other end of the scale and can effectively achieve different business objectives, but not all of them. Base on that scale, article marketing today is on the faster, shorter-term, relatively-less-traffic trajectory.  Does that meet with your company's business objective(s) and is that what you believe you're paying for?

[simon_realbuzz]

Article syndication may help you build links but often at a cost to your own site's search presence. In the past we syndicated content to many high authority sites and received much referral traffic. However, in the long term this came at a cost to our own site's ability to rank for our own content.

What would often happen is that, even though we had published the content on our site first, a high authority site would outrank us for that content. Very few content partners were willing to specify our version as the canonical version using a cross domain canonical and inevitably our search traffic began to fall.

Since Panda we've realised that unique quality content is a must, and while we may have lost out on the referral traffic we might have received from content partner sites, we figured that having unique content and being an authority in our own area of expertise is what we should be aiming at - not getting masses of referral traffic which is often bounced visits in any case.

Really you need to weigh up what the benefit is to you from syndicating your content and whether this is worth putting your own ability to rank in search for your own content at risk.

[EGOL]

Is article syndication still a safe & effective method of link building?

People only "thought" it was "safe".  Then penguin bit most of the websites that used article syndication.

We have an SEO agency pushing to implement article syndication as a method of link building.

When you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I don't syndicate anything. Never have, never well.  A page of great content costs too much money to give away.   It feeds existing competitors and creates new ones.

I simply write good content, post it on my own site, and traffic has grown steadily over time.  The more good content you have up, the more keywords it competes for, the more traffic you get, the more money you make.

[David_Veldt]

Thanks everyone, you've helped solidify my position on this. Link building is extremely difficult and there are fewer and fewer "safe" activities, and unfortunately we don't have an active blog on this particular domain, but ideally I would rather they wrote 1 high quality article for our own site than 4 low quality articles for syndication.

Chris - I definitely agree that even if these articles don't hurt us in the short-run, they won't help us much in the long run, so I think I'll push back and get them to come up with some more ideas.