Something sad was brought to my attention this morning. I have Google Alerts setup for a company I used to do SEO consulting for and something popped up from businessweek.com, a spammy and ultimately useless website that syndicates articles from services like PRNewswire. I worked for them three years ago and warned that these services provide little to no value in terms of customer acquisition or SEO. Besides the obvious issues with duplicate content (the same article being shared in multiple places) it’s hard to imagine potential customers finding their way to your site through another “product announcement” article that’s been reiterated multiple times.
Create Something Good and People Will Find Their Ways To It
If you build it they will come. If you’re still using tactics like article distribution (not to be confused with guest posting) then you need to go back to the drawing board with your SEO strategy. These companies are printing money off you. An expensive and unfruitful experiment would be to pay the $800 or whatever it is to have your article syndicated and then see how many hits your getting. In my past experience, the direct response benefit was marginal at best and from an SEO standpoint it was borderline harmful. I would rather get an article distributed on a small to medium authority website that was related then be featured randomly on a site like businessweek.com. Article distributing is the laziest and most obvious tactic in SEO and should be completely avoided if you want to maintain a natural link profile.
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