Last week or the week before, I don’t remember now, someone at one of the forums asked if it was a good idea to have the same article rewritten 1000 times so that she could submit it to 1000 different article directories. I think she said something about writing 10 pages of content a day, or something like that. I told her she’d be a lot better off coming up with a single page of really good content every day than using some kind of lame article spinner software to pollute the web with 1000 different versions of the same article. Some so-called SEO experts disagreed with me in strong terms, and he made sure to point out that he had lots of really good rankings for really good terms. At any rate, rather than make my argument from a position of “authority” based on my rankings, I’m going to explain my reasoning. But rather than waste that explanation as content for someone else’s forum site, I’m going to write about it here. Here’s why rewriting the same article over and over again is a waste of time.

It’s a waste of time because there are more effective uses of your time.

If you rewrite a single article 1000 times using some kind of article spinner so that you can submit that article to 1000 different article directories, then your article marketing efforts are going to get about the same kind of results as any other kind of lazy, no-effort link building strategy gets: mediocre short-term results at best. And just because you have great rankings now, and just because you’re using that strategy now, doesn’t mean that it’s an effective or sensible long-term strategy.

If you want to use article marketing effectively, then you need to be discerning. You should be handpicking the sites you’re willing to submit articles too. You should then focus on submitting outstanding (not good or good-enough content, outstanding content) to that site, so they’ll be likely to accept more content from you in the future. Since you’re selecting really great sites to submit your work to, then your syndicated articles will have a strong chance of ranking well, which benefits you and the other site. You get exposure via the article, and links, and traffic, and the site you submitted your content to gets more traffic.

Would you rather waste your time getting 12,000 crappy links? Or would you rather use your time wisely and pick up 12 really strong links?

I know which option I’m going to choose, and I’m going to choose that option every time. My rankings won’t suffer for it either.

Never assume that someone is right about something just because they have great rankings. Lots of webmasters are ranking really well for “Hollywood phrases” in spite of using boneheaded short-term strategies that are designed to avoid actually thinking about what they’re doing. But you don’t want to rank well “in spite” of your strategies. You want to rank well “because of” your strategies. That’s a big deal.

Sure, you might be able to get a top ten listing for a phrase like “online poker rooms” by using a massive linkbuilding campaign by submitting spammy, unoriginal, rewritten versions of one article to thousands of article directories. But how long do you think that strategy will be effective anway? And wouldn’t you rather rank for that phrase by gettting a dozen or two dozen really good links instead?

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Duplicate Content, Poker Link Building . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.