It is not big secret that article marketing is great for SEO and traffic. However, if you have to keep writing a post for your blog and a post each for 20 article directories, can you really get through the writing?

The answer is to ‘repurpose’ content. In short, write a post, publish it to your blog and then syndicate it to various article websites, making changes as required so that it becomes a stand alone piece.

However, with talk of Google duplicate content filters in the past many people are frightened of this. But they shouldn’t be! Late in 2010 Google updated this filter and it now works properly.

It used to be that Google would gather together all websites with the same article / post and only include the highest PageRank website in the results. This was their arbitrary way of reducing loads of very similar content to just the one result. A great idea for people searching for content, but blatantly often unfair on the original source.

But with the death of PageRank (how else do you explain 1 PageRank update in the last year?) and Google moving onwards to a fairer system, it seems they have hit upon a method that works.

What seems to happen now is that they are paying more attention to links. If the same content appears on 10 websites and they all link to the same website, which is also displaying that content, then it is the 11th website that appears above the rest!

So if you re-purpose content and include a link back n your biography, you are forming this web of links and should be credited as the original source.

If you want to know more about this, have a read through the set of posts I wrote about duplicate content over on my web design blog. It follows an experiment I ran last November and my own page is still the first result of almost 100 results returned.

Has Google given up on its PageRank™ measure of websites? Is PR dead? Is it gone and forgotten forever?

Over recent months there has been much discussion on this aspect and given that a large portion of bloggers are being paid to blog, and that payment is based on the blog’s PageRank, it is a thorny issue to many bloggers.

The problem stems from the fact that for 8 months we have not seen any major updates to the value displayed in the toolbar. Yes, a few sites have moved up or down 1 ranking, even few have seen moves of 2 rankings, but the majority of websites are the same as they were at the beginning of April 2010, when the last major update took place.

Why would the system be dropped? Well PR is just a measure of the combination of how many other websites link in to your website and their own PR value. And that means that if people start trading and buying links, the whole system can collpase in on itself.

So Google needed a new idea. And to me that is monitoring what people actually do on websites. Do they bounce, or do they continue their research? And how does that pattern compare to other sites for the same keywords.

This information is available – through Google’s Analytics and those people still using the PageRank Toolbar.

My only question is – why do we keep seeing minor changes? I think it is so that we all think it is still active and they can continue to grab a small amount of data through it.

Submitting your articles to 400+ article directories has great search engine benefits, but it does not always work as well as it should if you submit 400 identical articles. So how do we get about that?

Well, for a start, be very careful with this technique, do not over do it and do not use it on articles or reviews submitted to the very best article sites!

The first step is to rewrite your articles between article directory submissions. This is fabulous, but when you submit your new article to 30 websites in one go and 400+ directories in a second batch, then there is not the option to rewrite as you go.

For this reason I use MAS, which provides a thesaurus and makes suggestions as to what selected words can be changed to. Unfortunately, I have seen this techinque used to the extreme and even the titles of articles become totally unreadable, never mind the content of the piece. So be very careful when using this technique, read the output and check that it still makes sense. Go for correct English language articles rather than something that is totally changed, but absolute nonsense.

What tools for example MAS do is quite straightforward. Within your article you pick the words to change, or ‘spin’. This is then coded up and you paste the ‘spun’ version of the article into the system that you are submitting via. This system then randomly picks one option from each spin and should, therefore, even with hundreds of reprints, always end up with unique articles or reviews.

You could do this manually, but it it far quicker and more time efficient to use a tool. Merely check what it writes and post the original, not the spun version, to the best article sites!

Next, start blogging. If you do not already have a site on your site, get one. Then post copies of articles or reviews, chunks of articles or reviews or whatever, to your own blog. Sometimes I split articles down to post to my own websites and sometimes I join a couple together.

Why site even though? There are two reasons. First, you are constantly adding new, fresh content to your web site. Although you have a static web site, by blogging you have a constant flow of new content and search engines will see this and you get a huge boost. It is much better to have a fresh web site than a stale one when you are fighting for search engine visitors.

Second, if people are searching for what you talk about in your articles, then if you have them published on your web site they might just find your site and take an interest. A few make become subscribers to the website and eventually buyers.

Ultimately, you might also compile a collection of your posts into an ebook and either sell it to your traffic, offer it in return for signing up to a newsletter or give it away for several other reason.

Forget changing the code of your site, concentrate on what matters – get some articles or reviews written!

It has been a long 5 months since the April PageRank update, which gave this site its first bit of ranking (PR0). The signs are good and the chatter is there that another update is imminent. So, should I be expecting to log on tomorrow morning to a blog with a PR at last?

Personally, I think that this could be the weekend that we finally see Google running a September PageRank Update and putting all of those of us who follow this pointless measure out of our misery.

This blog never really does that much in the way of paid posting, but others that I have do quite a bit. But, that is as much the blog’s age (not having had many months to build links etc) as anything else.

And whether PageRank itself is important or not, it is still a badge that plenty of people wear and share. When I visit a site and it is PR0 or grey barred, I expect that it is new or of little value. And that is what this blog shows. It’s when you see a PR5 in the toolbar that you give it credit and sit back and enjoy all of the pages that are on offer.

So fingers crossed for an update tonight that does me a few favours!

The first step to getting more people on the site has to be placing comments on other blogs. Now, this can be done for 2 reasons. First, for link building, second for traffic.

If you are lucky then the comment drives both – search engine friendly links AND new unique visitors. Does it work? Well I know for certain that I see visitors arriving from blogs that are nofollow blogs, but these don’t give any link juice. So the first step to increasing the traffic on this site is to place comments on “dofollow” blogs.

Why on “dofollow” blogs (and this is one, so leave a comment!)? Well, that way if I comment on enough blogs and then start seeing people arriving from a handful, I can concentrate on following those blogs going forward and know that my work is having both effects. If I just comment on nofollow blogs, then there is no link advantage, just the hope of traffic. But at least a tiny amount of an advantage should be received from all of the dofollow links that are created.

So, how to find the blogs? Well, here are some recommended links to dofollow blogs that I will be trying out:

1. Why Do Work
2. Nicusor
3. Dlist
4. Do Follow Blogs
5. Follow List
6. Blogs that Follow
7. Squidoo
8. minterest
9. Do Follow 001

So far, I have only tried out some of the sites on the list and I am going to work my way down the list. Why Do Work’s list I tried out a few weeks ago and I have to say that I have seen no traffic and a few of the sites were not actually taking comments. So not the best list. But maybe a few suitable sites there. I am also still waiting for my own blog to get listed. I am not convinced that site is updated.

As for Nicursor, well the list definitely looks frequently maintained and has provided a few links from which I have got some of the sites listed above and I have just posted comments on a few of the blogs. Time will tell whether the blogs listed there are any good.

The Dlist is huge – about 200 blogs. But many are Blogger redirects, expired websites and blogs that have not posted for a long time (the worst offender was 3 years!). But there were some useful sites on the list and if you are a traditional ‘mommy blogger’, then there are loads of sites for you to explore!

And if you own any of the sites listed above do let me know – I have left all of the above links as dofollow.

Is link building in any form worth while, or is it a waste of time? Do links benefit your web site and push you up the results, or is it all one big myth? Have a look at my experiment results!

I have of late been carrying out a few experiments with link building to see what the effects are. I am part way through the entire test, which aims to find out if too many links can equally destroy the good work. But I am noticing several interesting results.

For my test I picked on a new site of my own that included a claim phrase from a paid to post system. This claim phrase is a random group of words that is just found on web-sites trying to become members of the system, so it is very unlikely that anyone else on the internet is running any SEO on it.

My blog, at the outset of the experiment, was 35th in the Google search results for this claim phrase and nowhere to be found on Bing or Yahoo. I used the phrase as the anchor text for a link to the post page from a PR3 site that I also control.

Give it a week and Google has been all more than the PR3 website. Funnily, this site is suddenly 12th on the results. At first, the blog moved up from 35th to 15th and then 10th, finally stepping above my PR3 site.

So through a single link on a PR3 page, my site jumped 2 full pages for this totally uncontested phrase on Google. It hadn’t moved a single place until the day I saw that the PR3 website had been revisited by Google. So, the merely explanation for the jump of 25 positions is this new found link to it.

But, it is also interesting to note Bing and Yahoo. Neither had the post page listed in the search results prior to the link going live. Yahoo did quite quickly collection the PR3 site with the collection on it for the search terms, which was quite promising, but it took a few more days until it also listed the post, down on the bottom of page 4.

The interesting difference between Google, Bing and Yahoo is the number of results each return. Bing and Yahoo return 30 – 40 results on this search yet exactly the same search on Google returns almost 800 existing results.

It appears that Google is being less fussy about what pages it caches and lists in the search engines. And when looking at how numerous pages of the website that Yahoo has indexed, they are nigh on all category and archive pages. There is only one post page listed in the archives – the one in this testing.

So, it looks as although because of one PR3 page pointing to the post, Google has promoted the website from 35th to 10th and Yahoo has taken an interest in the page and also cached it and listed it well. Bing though, is only being slow (it hasn’t visited the PR3 page for a few time).

Therefore, inbound links are beyond doubt the lifeblood of a web site. They do move you up the results and make search engines take notice of the pages. Next, I’ll test whether a web site wide link destroys the position or aids it!

This is a theory that I keep coming back to time and time again – it looks to me as though having an outbound link on your page that contains the desired keyword has a positive impact.

Now, I can not know if this applies to only when the link points to pages on your own web site or any outbound links, but time and time again I see before me the evidence that this might just be the case.

Last night I was comparing 2 of my own web-sites. The first, with Page Rank 3 and heaps of SEO work against the second, Page Rank 0 and ignored. They are both sites, feeding from the same cottages database, listing the same cottages in the same towns etc. The differences to the title and description tags are tiny, and anyway, I doubt these elements hold much weight. Not enough that rent [town name] against [town name] rent is going to explain the differences I am seeing.

But the fact of the matter is that the lower page rank web site gets 4 times the visitors of the other web site. When we are submitting articles for the higher ranking web site, its visitors increases. But, as soon as we stop, it drops back to the 25% mark.

Each page is ever so slightly different with a small thesaurus applied to the text, but not that much different. In essence, the web sites are the same.

So why does the newer, lower Page Rank, totally ignored site get 4 times the visitors of the website that I have lavished a lot of hours on trying to increase its visitors.

At this point I looked at the visitors stats merely to see where traffic were finding the sites. The lower visitors site had a few searches for odd terms. The search engines obviously picking up cottage names and descriptions from deep within the website. So they are trawling the site well (some inner pages have Page Ranks of 2).

For the poorer cousin with plenty of traffic, the main search results were [town name] rent and so on. The sort of searches that are more abundant, produce more visitors and are more competitive.

So, even if there is a lack of search engine optimisation and Page Ranking, it is doing better in the search results. For this reason I started to look at the town pages of both website to see where and how often the word rent was mentioned and also the same for the particular town.

Basically, looking at the town name, the sites were near enough the same. OK, one site has “rent” before the town name and the other after it, but the search engine results showed both versions anyway – if anything, more favoured the way they were shown in the lower ranking site.

There was just one instance of the words rent and the town name on the higher visitors website that the lower traffic site did not use. And that was in the breadcrumbs!

The higher visitors website offers links to the higher level pages and the present page through the breadcrumbs, the lower visitors web site just relied on the main navigation to cover it.

So, there is an obvious change and an equally obvious conclusion. The difference in traffic is because one site has an outbound link containing the search terms. Why would this be? That is for another time?