Wow I never knew they felt so strongly against article marketing. What would be crazy is if they go and banned ezine articles’ google adsense account. That would be something indeed.

Guest posting is way different from article marketing though because it does not become duplicate content. That is why it is such a powerful strategy. Right now though I have a different mindset and do not want to rely on SEO.

Guest blogging brings way more benefit by being able to interact and build a solid following of people. Who knows what kind of evolved panda or other type of animal comes next to derank sites.

I am happy to say that it would not affect me one bit because I will not be depending on Google anymore. =-)

I’ve just discovered this place an hour ago – yep, content is king sometimes, I’ve read several posts now and will keep reading as soon as I leave this comment 🙂

It hasn’t been more than 4 or 5 months since I first heard about SEO. I learned hard since and have two informative niche websites, the first one ranks fairly well, and heck, now I even know what h tags are and how to set them up ;). But now, get this: I got in in a very, very bad time. Learning a completely new skill is hard enough even without the major change in rules.

For my first site, I did OK with Ezine Articles, some Web 2.0 profiles, a few guest posts, some blog commenting and forum profiles – well, you go after the advice from more experienced people. I’m on page one, haven’t got the Google love letter, it is fine.

But now I have no clue what to do with the new site. Except from the guest posts, all of the other backlinking methods I’ve been using are now considered spammy; I realize I have to diversify my anchor text (meaning a lot more backlinks to rank), but – I don’t know WHERE to put them now. I can’t do just guest posting, and with a small niche site (having an inexperienced owner) it’s difficult to make link baits…

So what I’m really trying to ask here: is there any way that you could recommend a niche website, a new one, how to build its backlinking strategy? Heck, I’m not asking for a blueprint, but now there’s just too much no-nos… and I’m still struggling with the “old ways”.

Lol, I tried to google “survive 2012 seo”, I even have no idea on how to search for the info I need…

Anyway, I would really appreciate if you had some advice on this.

thanks for the article, really good 🙂 maybe we should be “everywhere” if our traffic comes from multiple streams such as social media, article marketing and so on we do not rely that much on google.

I just started in SEO and related stuff (turned out that I came at the wrong moment :))

I have a question: is it possible that Google spotted the identical articles and remove all the backlinks except one, and that determined the decreased in traffic? And maybe they did not look for the resource box, but for the entire article, so that say the author published five articles, then they were copied in another 100 websites, so from 105 backlinks Google downgraded to 5?

Daniel

Thanks David!
Wendy

This is IMO the BEST route to take.

-Omar

Hi David

Thanks for the recommendation. Someone in the Google Webmaster forums told me my site had no “hierarchical navigational structure”. I’m not really sure what that means but it’s something I’m looking at trying to fix.

I had a look at the plug-in from Terry Kyle but I can’t imagine having a link to every post (I have about 250 posts) in my sidebar. It would go on waaay too long.

Going to look at the other one you recommended now.

James

Hi Wendy,

This should help… http://yoast.com/wordpress-rel-author-rel-me/

Best regards,

David

Hi James,

What also might help in the long run is to make your site ‘look like’ an authority site in the eyes of Google. I have found the WordPress Plugins “WP Navbar Pro” and “Sticky Frontpage Categories and Tags” help immensely in this regard, especially with internal linking structure. Sometimes I feel we all get too caught up with inbound linking and neglect making things easy for the bots to crawl our entire site effectively.

Good luck with big G!

Best regards,

David

Good luck

Kind of like a Perfect Storm of Non-Malicious Negative SEO. These other sites just scraped his articles for content and, oddly, the majority of them were “good” scrapers and left his bio box and links in tact (yeah, I know – SHOCKER!).

For the same reason ask yourself if you really have to use Adsense, Analytics, Webmaster, Gmail or Google+, at all!

This article is the exact replica of what has happened to our site, rankings fell, filed a recon and got the unnatural link message from G. We have discovered the +50 articles we submitted to ezines on what we thought was sound advice have been posted all over the internet. We have started contacting these blogs to take down but most of the time there is no point of contact.

Should we remove all our articles from ezines, go articles etc?

Also if a blog is not indexed,but the backlink shows up in webmaster tools does is that link still hurting the site.

I find the whole Cutts /anti spam team just to be stalking horse for the advertising side of the house and totally uncreditable. What is really funny is all the people who actually believe the whole make great websites and google will find you and reward you. Yep, you will be on page 10 with some totally unrelated content.

So while the whole world grieves and beats their chest about all those bad guys (SEO) at the end of the day the only way to get you site within the first 3 pages of Google in under 5 years is by not doing what Matt Cutts says. Sad but true..

Meanwhile remember Google is not a public service it is an advertising agency ( a multi billion dollar advertising agency) that has gone from “Do no harm” to being a 500 lb internet gorilla with emotions to match.

—end of Rant. Great Posts and enjoy reading your stuff 🙂

Thank you for the informative article. Could you please tell me how to add the rel me tag? And do you have to add it to every page?

Thanks very much
Wendy

This is been a verry interesting read for me today. I am putting on my ‘research hardhat’ and do some studying of my own sites now. =)