Hi SEO experts, Please share your thoughts on the effectiveness for SERPS and general SEO between buying/writing unique quality content or buying directory/blog submissions (manually). What works better for you? Content or Submissions? The past months I focussed on quality unique content rather that submissions. A couple of my new sites without any submission but with quality content got indexed within hours and are ranking very well after a couple of weeks. As I am not a favorit of submissions, pricy, result is not clear, a lot of spam/confirmation etc. I am very interested in your opinion about directory submissions. Also your point of view on RSS submissions / Bookmarking sites etc. is very interested for me and others. Thanks for your professional view and reply.
you did a pretty good job in doing quality unique content ... i believe google would love it once you got enough quality content you can always go for Directory submissions, Blog & Article submissions, Social Bookmarking review submissions, Buying high PR Links
Ohh... why is that? I learned Google is counting the amount of Inbound links for the calculation of SERPS. If your links or bookmarks are DOFOLLOW it could help your SERPS accoording to this lesson. My experience is after buying a couple of submissions packages of different providers here on DP my amount of inbound links increase but not drastic. For now unique content stays on #1 for me. Thanks. More interesting point of views?
the unique content is crucial ... but after writing good articles, of course you have to do some submissions too... bevouse if you try to reach nr1 on google with general words like games, free download or other ... you must have strong general seo, many IBLs ...
Yes, these are inbound links, if they come from dofollow web sites. I think that links from directories and social bookmarks sites have not the same worth than spontaneous backlinks from other sites or blogs. Google knows that these links come from directories and social bookmarks sites.
I agree on spontaneous backlinks, usually they work better as people are really searching for a specific topic. Thanks for your reply. Did you vote already?
If you're looking for SEO experts, this is the wrong place to be looking. I don't buy content. I write it (being able to write, and having something useful to say gives me that wonderful competitive advantage). Unlike buying content, which I am never sure if it was originally written by the person I'm buying from, being bought by me for me exclusively, or stolen, I know first-hand that what I write is my own, and thus I'm able to avoid most, if not all, of the issues surrounding content with regard to the search engines. What's to be confused about? Writing original content will beat submissions every time - especially when you write (again with the "W" word!) engaging editorial summaries of the original content that makes people want (no, NEED) to read more and submit THEM (along with a link back to the full version) instead. Congratulations. Now promote the pages on those sites, and get some relevant quality back-links pointing to them. Don't be surprised when (not if) their rankings fluctuate over time. Some like to call it a "sandbox" effect. It's not. It's actually perfectly normal. Just consider it a reminder to stay at the top of your game and you'll do fine. Submit to them. The strength of the links pointing back to your pages will be weak, but that's not the point. You want to submit to established directories that are related to your sites which also happen to be used by people (in other words, diretories related to your sites that actually drive focused and targeted traffic to your sites). If a directory is new, isn't related to your site, looks spammy/dodgy, or requires you link back to them - don't. (Ok, I'd probably take a chance on a new directory related to my site's niche/topic - if my site was already established and doing well.) I'm not a fan of it, to be honest. If I had to do one, I'd focus my effort on RSS marketing - but make it clear that I'm offering the feed as a service to those who prefer to get their content delivered via RSS. Also unlike a lot of marketing "gurus" and "professionals" I'd leave ads free and use the complete text of the feed (along with copyright statements and other legal forms of protection) - who knows, maybe what I write some day could prove to be so intriguing that it causes an RSS reader (as in a person, not a program) to actually visit my site and see what else I have to offer. Don't buy links - unless you plan (or expect) to have them no-followed. I'll agree - that's not optimizing. That's marketing. But I'd still do the former anyway (again, I'm not sold on "social bookmarking"). It's not just the link - it's also the quality, relevance, and strength of the link that counts. Don't you mean PageRank (which can influence your SERPs)? What about the traffic though? And how well did it convert into sales or repeat visitors or forum registrations (or whatever the purpose of your site is)? If that traffic isn't converting, you might as well be giving your money away. True. The competition for those highly competive keywords is fierce, and will probably take upwards of five years or more to break into the top 5. But if you work at it, it can be done - especially if you work on cornering the other "markets" (your other keywords) at the same time. Though it's not just the content and the links. You also have to write the content (especially your TITLE and META description tags) to make people want to click your link instead of the competition's. If you can do that, don't be surprised if you get more targeted traffic that's already been pre-conditioned to convert (I WANT THIS!!! And I NEED IT NOW!!!) into customers, registrations, repeat visitors - whatever, which may make your site more successful than those who are out-ranking you. Links are links are links. Even if the links are not followed, the text in the anchor tags will be counted. How else do you think spammers can get their crap (which has nothing to do with the example I'm about to provide) to rank well in the search engines when they spam the blogs of classic car clubs in San Diego, California, for example? And you would be correct. The strength of those links tends to be weak - for example, having a backlink from a blog article in the same niche will be far better than having the same link buried in that blog entry's comments or some stupid Squidoo lense.
Unique Quality Content.... I'll let Dan Schulz tear you guys up in this thread, I'm on 0 hours of sleep since Sunday morning due to a stupid people in my company who have no concept of difference between purging a centershift database and running maintance on centershift database. So i've spend the last 26 hours reverting and restoring 300+ stores plus our centralized database linked to centershift itself. Basically I can't say i wouldn't get 50 infactions taking my sleepless anger out on all the useless posts that will appear here.
This makes no sense, content and links work hand-in-hand, and shouldn't be viewed as one or the other... You create quality content, then build links to this quality content.
If you are writing unique and interesting content, how will you make money? If visitors go to your site to read, they willl read and then leave...any money in that??? If you are reviewing a product, then you can sell it. Do Not Underestimate Links!!! I have had several websites in the top 3 positions of Google and one website is currently number 2 for keywords that have 1.7 million results. Now check this out...the keywords are not in the content but are in the anchor text of 2500 backlinks.
Do Both, I don't think following a single trick for a very long period is going to help much. Use as many as you can.
Content, in my opinion, has a double strength. Text in topic with my web site. Pages and pages of optimized text. And search engines like text. If my web site has a lot of pages, my web site can be more interesting for my users and visitors, so I can get spontaneous backlinks. Submissions in directories and in Social bookmarks sites are only links... yes, a link is a link, a link is a gate open to my web site, but a link in directory is not spontaneous, is not relevant with the topic of my site.
Don't use any tricks - just go with the fundamentals, and dig in. It's going to be a long and bumpy ride, but the results will be more than well worth it.