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Do you recommend article marketing as an SEO strategy?

Do you recommend article marketing as an SEO strategy? - answered by Matt Cutts

Matt's answer:

Today we have a question from Jeff in Orange County, California. Jeff asks, “Do you recommend article marketing as an SEO strategy, and how are the back links treated when other websites republish the same article?” Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of article marketing. I mean if you think about it, it’s you’re writing an article, you try to include a link at the bottom or something like that, and you’re hoping a bunch of other people put up copies or mirrors or duplicates of that article, and then that those links might flow through. Typically, the sorts of sites that just republish these articles are not the highest quality sites. A lot of times the articles themselves are not the highest quality site. So someone will say you have to write x many words and someone will write exactly x many words. You end up with a lot of duplicate content across the web, sometimes duplicate anchor text. So if I had to foresee what does the trend hold, these are not as much editorial links where someone is really making a choice, I think this is a great site, as a lot of other links on the web. So should you pursue article marketing? I would probably lean away from that and lean more towards great content that naturally has links. Some good social media marketing so that people are linking to it organically for reasons that they really love it, rather than someone needs five articles to put up on their website and they just go to this article bank somewhere and they just grab five articles and they just slap it up on their website. That tends to be not as high quality in terms of links, as regular links, that people are actually deliberately making across the web. So if I had to make a prophecy or forecast about how Google feels or how search engines feel about them in general, the trend that I’m hearing and the complaints that I’m hearing are that people are not huge fans of article marketing. That they don’t view it as an incredible value ad in terms of the content that gets added to the web.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: