The Art of SEO, 2nd Edition

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 behind content syndication is developing 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 sometimes referred to as guest posting, as blogs are often the target destination for such content. Provided that the content is relevant to your 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 in terms of 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. Furthermore, if the site accepting the content from you is more authoritative than your site, it will likely rank for your article and your site won’t!

  When looking to distribute ...