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A few weeks ago I wrote about outsourcing your content writing to help you build your affiliate business. So far this year I’ve received 210 articles from SEO Article Writing Pros covering a variety of niches. So, what are you supposed to do with all those articles?
You can do several things with your outsourced content such as article marketing, trading articles with other sites in your niche, submitting your articles to authority sites in your niche and of course, simply adding the content to your own sites. Having massive amounts of content however doesn’t mean that you just put up everything all at once. You’ll want to selectively release your work so as to give the search engines the impression that your sites and incoming linking process are an ongoing work.
Several years ago I outsourced about 80 articles to get incoming links through article marketing and it ended up backfiring because of the process I used. One of my vacation sites and our healthy diet site was deindexed by Google and Yahoo shortly after these efforts and in the case of the vacation site there was probably another reason for the deindexing, which I’ll cover later, that the article marketing efforts identified.
In getting incoming links, you want to to get a natural trickle of links pointing to your site over time, not all at once. You also want to vary the anchor text pointing to pages on your site as well. The mistake I made was posting the same article, sometimes 2 or 3 at a time, that had the same anchor text to 10 or 15 different article directories every day for a month. We never know exactly what Google wants, but apparently they don’t like seeing links coming into your site at the rate of 600 a month if it doesn’t look natural. Had these links come from different sites or blogs at this rate they would have at least had different anchoring text and different content in each post or article.
Now while you may be thinking this is a duplicate content penalty, that’s not what it is. Duplicate content only means posting the same article to your own site that is found somewhere else on the net. My belief is that this is an unnatural linking process that looked to Google as though I was trying to do nothing but get tons of links into my sites. I believe the other reason my vacation site bit the dust (it has since recovered) was that all the incoming links helped Google see that there were way to many affiliate links on the site. I’ve also since removed over 300 of these links from that site.
So what’s the proper way to do article marketing?
When submitting to article directories, I never submit more than 1 article per day with links pointing to the same site and never use the same article twice. In other words you want to simply use each article one time and let the natural process of other people picking up your articles bring you additional links.
It’s probably not as critical when using your outsourced articles for adding additional pages to your site, but I would recommend a slow process in this area as well. It is believed that Google likes to see fairly consistent changes being done to a site so it stands to reason if you put up 75 to 100 pages on a site in a couple of afternoons Google will notice your site less. For this reason I will add no more than 5 pages a day to any one of my sites, but most of the time its 2 to 3 pages every couple of days. This way if you have 100 articles, your site will be constantly changing over a 3 month or so period.
I just want to offer a little disclaimer here because much of what I’m saying about Google is pure speculation and only what I’ve been experiencing in my own business. We all know Google is a fickle beast to figure out, so you have to keep poking it with a stick until you see life in your niche. However, I can tell you that slow, steady consistent work never hurt anyone.
Use this as an example and find the content outsourcing and article marketing process that works best for you and your business.
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