The Art of SEO

More Approaches to Content-Based Link Acquisition

Content is your most important asset in link building. Leveraging your content—together with your users and online networks—can lead to scalable link acquisition and some exciting results.

A Closer Look at Content Syndication

The concept in content syndication is to develop content with the intent of publishing it on someone else’s site. In return for providing the content, the author gets a link back to her site. This is a legitimate strategy in the eyes of the search engines because the site is endorsing the content by accepting it, and the return links are an acknowledgment of that endorsement.

It is also often possible to get targeted anchor text in this scenario. Be careful, however, because if the anchor text is unrelated to the article itself, it will not comply with what the search engines want publishers to do for link-building techniques.

There are a couple of important points to watch for when syndicating content:

• The publisher should strive not to distribute articles that are published in the same form on the publisher’s own site. Search engines will see this as duplicate content. Although the search engine’s goal is to recognize the original author of a piece of content, it is a difficult job to do perfectly, and it does happen that the search engines make mistakes.

  When looking to distribute content published on a site, the best practice is to rewrite the article, add some things to make it a bit different in structure and ...