Are Articles Really the Best Way to Influence Google?

A promo for Jason Potash's new product called ArticleAnnouncer contains this "Google Scorecard" -- a very good summary of what Google appears to be looking for in links these days.

1. Google considers the anchor text of incoming links and when they were first discovered.

2. Google considers the appearance and disappearance of a link over time.

Follow up:

3. If a new website gets a flood of new inbound links, the site will still be considered legitimate if some links are from authoritative sites.

4. If a stale webpage continues to receive new incoming links, it will be considered fresh.

5. Google indicates that incoming anchor text links should contain a variety of different (yet related) key phrases and not be all the same.

6. Google might consider links from fresh pages to be of more importance.

7. Google considers links with a long life span to be of higher value than links with a short life span.

8. Google places more value on a site where link growth remains constant and slow.

Jason Potash summarizes this: "As you can see, there is a HUGE emphasis placed on the quality and quantity and frequency of fresh incoming links to your websites."

As I mentioned, this is part of a pitch to sell ArticleAnnouncer, because the placement of "articles" around the web is considered by many (and not surprisingly, by Jason Potash) as the easiest and best method of exploiting some of Google's new tactics.

Now don't get me wrong. My own analysis of Google's recent changes pretty much concurs with the summary given above. There is no doubt that Google is tightening things up, and giving more importance to what is referred to as the "history" of your web pages.

I also know from first hand experience that writing articles is a powerful way to boost your web presence.

Further, I suspect that ArticleAnnouncer is a good product, since the one product of Jason's that I am familiar with, namely Ezine Announcer, was well worth the price of admission.

However, I have a couple of concerns with this presentation...

First, the source of this theorizing about Google's intentions is the patent application made earlier this spring (March 2005), and which I have commented on a couple of times previously. (See The Importance of History to Google.

Most of these very definite-sounding conclusions are quite speculative. Especially all the dire warnings about Google penalizing websites if they don't do things in specific ways. Most of the warnings coming from internet marketers are not the result of first hand experience. Rather, these warnings are motivated by a strong desire to sell you their "solution".

I don't think it is helpful (or completely honest) to overstate the changes taking place at Google, since nobody really knows what they are, or when, or if, they are being put into place. The value of link exchanges, for example, is often debunked by self-proclaimed SEO experts. But there are still sensible and smart ways to get links from other sites by swapping and buying links. Nothing has really changed here. Link farms and pointless garbage linking have always been a waste of time.

Second, while I agree that publishing articles is good way of enhancing your web presence (and generating links),I have reservations about viewing "article" publishing primarily as a means of getting fresh links. Strategies aimed at spreading articles around the web can easily degenerate into just another spam technique. Low-traffic article sites with thousands and thousands of articles that nobody every looks are not a valuable web resource. They are just more spam.

How hard can it be for Google to recognize these article sites as nothing more than glorified link farms? Isn't it pretty easy to spot a site with 10,000 "articles", many of which are plastered around in other sites (and are therefore duplicates of articles found elsewhere)?

Yes, there are ways to control the quality of article sites. But already as articles have been recognized as an effective answer to the "fresh inbound link" problem, garbage article sites filled with garbage articles have sprung up. And of course you can now buy software to automatically create new articles from old ones -- including old ones written by other people.

So I will wager that it is just a matter of time before Google will declare that article sites are just as open to abuse as "free-for-all" link farms, reciprocal linking schemes, and heavily inter-linked mini-networks. Without original content and a meaningful raison d'etre all of these things are equally "un-natural" attempts to manipulate search engine rankings.

In fact, I would be surprised if they have not already developed policies that recognize the manipulative purposes inherent in planting duplicate copies of articles around the web.

Rick Hendershot is a writer and internet publisher offering advertising and promotional opportunities through The Linknet Network.