Indirect Link Earning via dofollow Links In News Articles

[bionewstx]

Hello, MOZ SEO Gurus.

I've been trying to think some deep thoughts on safe, effective link earning for news publishing sites, and wanted to run this up the flagpole and see if you salute.

Our site is a biotech news service -- we pump out copious amounts of news content each day, which works well for driving traffic. That being said, we also want to rank some optimized landing pages as well. Take, for example, this page, which we'd like to rank for "secondary progressive MS" and related keywords:

http://bionews-tx.com/secondary-progressive-ms/

Now, as far as I'm concerned, shopping this page around to MS influencers isn't easy. I can go to Foundational websites, blogs, etc., and say, "hey, we have this info page on SPMS, and I thought that you might find it helpful/want to link to it." But chances are, the MS influencers already have their own proprietary content on SPMS, and there isn't much value to linking to it. Therefore, I think that we'll get few link earning conversions on the effort.

However, what if I take our Secondary Progressive MS landing page, and I link to it in a corresponding article about SPMS research, as I did here:

http://bionews-tx.com/news/2014/01/30/secondary-progressive-ms-natalizumab-clinical-trial/

Then, I go to the drug developer who is at the center of this story and say to them, "hey, we recently covered your drug in the news, and I thought you might want to link to it." Then, we get a link from an MS drug developer to the news article, which in turn has a prominent anchor text, dofollow internal link to the landing page for SPMS.

If the link from the drug developer is dofollow, then we flow page rank juice from the drug developer page to our news page to our landing page.

To me, it's much easier to earn safe links this way than to try and shop the landing page itself. That being said, if we get a dofollow link on the news piece, we only get a diminished portion of page rank going to the landing page.

Is this strategy viable? Is the indirect flow of page rank from a linking site to a news article to a landing page even worth it? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks!

[EGOL]

Your use of "Link Earning" got my attention. 

I looked at your site and saw that you do have content that can earn links.  Nice work!

I have a site that publishes similar articles but in a different industry.  Out best performing page to get links and bring people to the site daily is an industry news page.   We use a wordpress blog to post one, two or three sentence news blurbs that link to informative content or news that exists anywhere on the web.

We generally have six to ten posts scheduled to go out about three to four times a week.  These go out in a feedburner email message and lots of people subscribe by RSS feed.  Because those posts are so short the are noindexed but we have over 100 category pages that are indexed, bring in tons of traffic from search and attract likes, links, RSS subscrivers and tweets for people who want to follow a smaller niche.

This news index page brings a few thousand visitors per day to the site (in a smaller industry than yours) and has about 20,000 RSS and email subscribers accumulated over several years.  When we have new content it is given a post and that immediately brings in a lot of interested people who tweet, like, email and share.

We wrote a perl script that scrapes the category feeds and republishes a server side include for the eight most recent posts (by category).  That include is posted on each article page in that category and brings lots of readers to the news category page.  Another program scrapes the entire feed and publishes a server side include for the most recent twenty posts.  This include appears on our homepage.  Lots of people daily come to our homepage to look at that list and click what they want to read.

Since you are producing so much content a similar blog could be a good way to blast your content out there to interested people and pull them into your site when you have new content.

[bionewstx]

EGOL,

That sounds like an awesome approach! I wonder: we have a substantial amount of tag and category pages that we can carefully used to make sure that all of our content is properly tagged. Could these be shopped for links and RSS'ed out? After all, our site is a WordPress site, and as you know, if you stick a /feed on the end of just about anything, you get a custom RSS of whatever goes on it.

Thanks for your feedback.

[EGOL]

Could these be shopped for links and RSS'ed out?

Yes.  Lots of people know how to get an RSS feed without your help from a wordpress category.  But if you offer links to them then anyone who wants them can subscribe.  Lots of people subscribe to our categories by RSS.   Also, lots of links go to our category pages from industry niche sites.  Some publish our RSS feeds on their own sites.

[bionewstx]

Sounds good, EGOL. So, what do you think about my notion of using news articles with links to landing pages embedded as a means of getting page rank juice flowing and ultimately ranking the landing pages. Viable?

[EGOL]

So, what do you think about my notion of using news articles with links to landing pages embedded as a means of getting page rank juice flowing and ultimately ranking the landing pages. Viable?

Yes.  I would do it.

I do that on my site.  In fact, I have a wordpress plug-in named "SEO Smart Links" that automatically inserts a lot of those links.  You give it a list of keywords and URLs.. When the keyword occurs in a wordpress post it is hyperlinked to the URL that you specify.   On top of that, the server-side includes as described above put links into new blog posts from the most relevant pages across my entire site.  Just publish a post and BAM!!!  Dozens to hundreds of absolutely relevant links.

I do that mainly for driving traffic... but I know that there is a small linkjuice benefit - especially if the pages where the links are published have a lot of inbound links from other websites.

If I want to do a linkjuice play I put the link in my persistent navigation.  I know that links in my persistent navigation are very helpful for ranking a page of content and I have over 100 links in the persistent navigation.  This is a PR7 site with a hundreds of PR6 and PR5 pages - so I think that it has the juice to support it.

[bionewstx]

Oh, immense thanks, EGOL! The WordPress plug-in is a godsend, as we have tons of very high-quality, authoritative landing pages, and it will make for an efficient means of linking to them. Also, re: persistent navigation. I've been meaning to put a resources area in the menu bar with links to these landing pages -- which will also work well as info/destination pages as well. I guess I've always figured it just seemed too good to be true that having those links in the nab could really have a positive outcome. But we just recently got upgraded to PR5, so I guess we'll get to see what all that juice can do us. Thanks again!