Outbrain 'Promoted Stories'

[Martin_S]

A colleague and I have been discussing whether or not Outbrain's 'Promoted Stories' on the Telegraph.co.uk (for example) have any kind of value at all in terms of Google worth.

Is there organic value in the link from Outbrain box to your site? Or, is there value in the content that's being linked to despite the link to it being paid for? Is it ultimately worth is to use a content distro service like this? Why would I want to use this kind of service?

We seems at odds to the value these links bring - perhaps a kind Mozzer can enlighten us?

Thanks

[irvingw]

It's just advertising, there is no SEO benefit to their links. We tried it recently and discontinued because it was too expensive to justify. Your keywords and performance may be different though.

[WilliamKammer]

You don't engage in content distribution like that for the value of the direct links of your ads. A content distribution strategy has to start with extremely high quality, engaging content. Content that is so good, people consume it and want to share it. Services like Outbrain allow you to distribute your super awesome content to your demographics, and then your demographics will naturally build links to your content by sharing around the web.

If your strategy isn't working, it's most likely either your content isn't good enough or you're not targeting the correct demographics with it.

[SamuelScott]

Not everything on the Internet is relevant to the "SEO" world directly.

Services like Outbrain are meant to help to promote your content and are only worth it when you're content and social media strategies are integrated and very good -- the people who see your image and headline in Outbrain (or others) click to your website, love the content, and are pushed to share it further. The whole idea has nothing to do with links directly (though people may become aware of your content via Outbrain and social media and then choose to link to you themselves -- thus gaining an earned link).

Secondly, I find that Outbrain and similar services are rarely useful for monetizing. It really only delivers significant revenue if you have a HUGE level of traffic such as Reddit or Fark.com or something.

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

Whether "links" pass any value is determined by how they're structures, so different content sharing platforms do and don't pass SEO value on a case by case basis. If the content is shared in an iframe, goes through 302 redirects or other similar techniques, is blocked from search engines, contains nofollowed links etc. then it offers no value. This is the "proper" way to share paid advertising content as far as search engines are concerned.

If you view the source of a page on which an Outbrain box appears, then search for the text used for link titles in that box, you won't find them in the source code. There is no a href link to the linked-to articles. This is because the content is being drawn in from elsewhere via the widget. As such, it looks identical to the regularly-linked to content, but it's not appearing in the source nor passing SEO value.

Again, some services will set their content sharing up differently, but they'd be remiss to set up a service that linked directly to external content, for money, in a way that benefitted the linked-to sites' SEO. Google frowns on that solely because it would be a paid link.

Cheers,

Jane