I wanted to write this post as a sort of silent response to the large number of membership sites out there now that claim to build you unlimited links. I’m not talking about those spammy systems that just swap hundreds of links with off topic sites…
What I mean are those sites that allow you to submit content, spin that content (with some funky set of characters and synonym setup) and then syndicate that content across hundreds of sites or blogs.
The types of services I’m talking about are those like
- LinkVana
- Article Marketing Automatiion
- My Article Network (Which is more or less a re-branded version of article marketing automation)
Anyways enough about the negative. I have a point to this post and it’s to share with you one point that none of these services seem to want to share with their members, but before I do that let’s look at the good points.
Good Point #1 – Your Link Shows up inside relevant content from the body of an article
This is a key point. You want on topic content surrounding your link, and the fact that these networks allow you to vary anchor text you can get multiple links to one page that have a variety of different anchor texts. Not to mention that link is in content which is far better then a stranded link in the footer, side bar or gutter of someones site.
Good Point #2 – Your Link is on a Variety of Sites & IP Addresses
So most of you probably know that having 100 links all from the Same IP address isn’t a ton of help for you. Instead you want to spread your links across a variety of IP addresses in a natural looking way. These membership sites (especially those like Article Marketing Automation where it’s other peoples sites your posting to) have sites across a lot of different hosting accounts, servers and IP addresses.
Ok so there are the good points…
Now let’s take a peek at what I feel is the BIGGEST mis-conception about these membership sites.
DOWNFALL NUMERO UNO
Your articles on these sites may or may not get cached by Google, and after that I would have to say that less then 1% of them will ever get cached a second time.
OK some of you are probably saying “Whats it matter if it gets cached, let alone cached a second time?”
A quick over view of the importance of Cache date and link Building.
FIRST
SIDEBAR: For those that don’t know what cache date is. If you have the google tool bar quickly click on the the pagerank bar and you get a couple of options. One is similar results, another is cache date. If you click that it gives you the most recent cache of any given page in the google index. This is the last date that google completely indexed that page and took a cache of it to replace the previous version they had.
Ok back to the story…
Here’s the thing, a link on a page that isn’t cached might as well not exist. Why? Because Google never ever finds it. You might be saying, “But what about Bing and Yahoo” forget about them for now… I go after the search engine that can send me over 60% of all traffic online… and that’s the BIG G.
These article we submit to sites like these may get indexed once by the search engines, but they rarely ever get indexed a second time. Why? For a couple of reasons. These sites we post articles to aren’t exactly web masters prized posessions. most of them contain adsense ads and that’s it. There is minimal if any promotion done to them to help Search engine spiders show up often and because of these there is no real “DEEP CRAWLS” of the sites.
This means that your link may get found once and you’ll get the credit for it but it likely will never get found again. So in order for these systems to be really effective you must continue to submit content, and more content and more content to keep a fresh/current link for your sites & pages out there.
What’s the benefit of your link on a freshly cached page you might wonder?
Well, for starters if a search engine spider finds your link more often it follows it through to your page more often. This is good because your page will continue to get the credit for that link plus get cached more often, which is also good.
Second, if you only have links to your site that are cached once then never again your link campaign will die off without a continuous injection of new content & links.
What can you do about this?
Truthfully there isn’t anything really worth while you can do about it. How ever if you do get an article posted on what you feel is a good site you could place a link or two in a blog post to that article on the other site. This will help keep that page fresh on the other site. Also you could do a small link building campaign to the page.
How ever when you start to think about all this work it might be more worth it to
a.) Pay a blogger to post an article for you on their site.
b.) Submit articles to the bigger directories that have a solid foot print of their own links out there.
c.) Post some content to social media sites like squidoo & hubpages and build some links to those (stay tuned I’m running a test on this right now).
SO Let’s Wrap it Up….
Are these types of membership worth it? Yes and No… They server a purpose to get quick exposure on a lot of IP’s and sites. How ever they cannot be your only method of promotion. Also they can take precious time away from your other projects if you aren’t careful that could provide more of an SEO benefit to your pages.