Article Marketing Blog and Forum

If you are reading this article then chances are you are a niche marketer, a blogger or someone who likes to get traffic from search engines due to their search engine optimization efforts.  We want links for our website and we want those links to count for something.  How can you tell if they are going to count for something though?  There is a really simple litmus test that I use.  That test has worked well for me on a number of websites.

First, I check to see if the site has any authority whatsoever.  Pick some page from the site that has a lot of content on it specifically about one topic.  The topic doesn’t really matter.  Do a Google search for the exact words in the page title.   That page should show up somewhere in Google’s top twenty results.  If it is showing up there then you know that page has some authority.   If that page is competing against a lot of other pages with the same exact title, then you can get a pretty good sense of how much authority it has compared to the other pages on other sites it is competing against.

The second thing you can do is check to see if that site looks like it has a lot of duplicate content.  Pick random snippets of text about half a sentence long.  Do an exact match search for that text in Google by surrounding the snippet with quotation marks.   If you see a whole bunch of pages with that same snippet of text on them, then the page is using spun content or else pure duplicate content.  When you see that happening it means that this particular site is either nearly worthless or soon to be nearly worthless in terms of link juice.   There are some exceptions though.  If you can be reasonably certain that this site is the original source of the document, then it could still be valuable.   Even if it is not the original source, it will still be valuable if it has more authority than the other pages that have the duplicate content on them.

What You Are Going To Find

You are going to find that a lot of article directories have lost their authority.  Most of the big name article directories still have some ability to get an article ranked.  A lot of the smaller unknown directories do not have enough authority to get an article ranked in the top twenty search results unless you are using a really long unique phrase that has zero exact match competition.

You are going to find that blogs tend to have unique content and more authority than most other sites.  It is easier to get a blog post, especially if it is a WordPress blog post, ranking higher in the search results.   WordPress posts are written well from an SEO standpoint.  The way blogs are structured also helps for search engine optimization.    Most blogs are monitored for quality at least to some degree.  All of these things matter.  Over time blogs tend to acquire more authority than article directories do.  You will find them to be better sources of link juice in general.