Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Article Marketing / Article Posting
-
I am working on the SEO on a few different websites and I have built out an article marketing campaign so that I can get high quality backlinks for my website.
I have been writing the content myself and I have been manually building out the top Web 2.0, Article Directory, and Doc Sharing sites.
today I was creating an account on squidoo and I wondered if it mattered if I had the username be one of two things:
-
my keyword as a user name, like: [keyword+geotag] example: roofinghouston
-
just my first and last name as the username (or just a username I always use)
(The reason behind #1 would be to have the optimized keyword and location I am trying to rank for, inside of the username. The reason for #2 would be that I don't want to get into trouble by having "too much" optimization.)
I know a bit about optimization and that getting your keyword out there is great in a lot of areas, but I am not sure if it looks "suspicious" if I have my username be the keyword+geotag.
I am just worried that all of this hard work will be torn down if I look like I'm trying too hard to be optimized, etc etc.
There is no one answer, I am mainly looking for shared experiences.
If you do have a definite answer, then I would like that too
Thanks SEOMoz!
-
-
Unfortunately, article directories didn't carry much link juice to begin with, and as Francisco said, Panda and Penguin have pretty much negated them as SEO tactics entirely. You might want to look at guest blogging, but make sure your articles are really something your readers will enjoy.
Good luck!
-
Hi Matthew,
if you haven't heard of the Penguin update, you HAVE to learn about it. It was an algorithm change on April 24 2012 that hit sites like squidoo. Many people have abuse article marketing (spinning) to try and get more rankings.
What I would recommend is to make some friends in your industry be using Followerwonk. Post on YOUR site and perhaps they can link to you. There are many blog posts on how to do this.
Also i recommend you read chapter 7 http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Phone number link / critical crawler issue
I've got 15 critical crawler issues coming up, all of which are ( tel: )links to the contact phone number. As this is a taxi firm, these links are pretty vital to customer conversion. Should I worry about these issues from an SEO perspective? If so, is there anything I can do about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul7300 -
Should you delete old blog posts for SEO purposes?
Hey all, When I run crawl diagnostics I get around 500 medium-priority issues. The majority of these (95%) come from issues with blog pages (duplicate titles, missing meta desc, etc.). Many of these pages are posts listing contest winners and/or generic announcements (like, "we'll be out of the office tomorrow"). I have gone through and started to fix these, but as I was doing so I had the thought: what is the point of updating pages that are completely worthless to new members (like a page listing winners in 2011, in which case I just slap a date into the title)? My question is: Should I just bite the bullet and fix all of these or should delete the ones that are no longer relevant? Thanks in advance, Roman
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dynata_panel_marketing1 -
Javascript onclick redirects / porn sites...
We noticed around 7 websites which with domains that were just recently registered (with privacy protection). They are using our website keywords/titles and brand name and the sites are mostly porn / junk sites. They don't link to our website directly but use a javascript onclick redirect which is why we think we aren't seeing them in our backlinks report. We've been in business for over 12 years and haven't come across sites like this before. We recently lost our first page rankings for a few of our highest converting key phrases and have been digging in to possible causes. Just wondering if these sites could be impacting our results, and how to figure out if there are more like this? Examples: nesat.net
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary
flowmeterdirectory.biz
finnsat.net
dotsjobs.net0 -
Article/ Blog Post submissions
Hello All, I'm looking to perform a 'Standard' guest blog post link building tactic, but i'm a little unsure as where to start. Does anybody have a list/ guide to websites that accept guest posts? Preferably ones that are useful for SEO purposes, I have been link building for about 3 months now, but to be honest, most of these links are NoFollow, which isn't too great! Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul_Tovey0 -
Should pages of old news articles be indexed?
My website published about 3 news articles a day and is set up so that old news articles can be accessed through a "back" button with articles going to page 2 then page 3 then page 4, etc... as new articles push them down. The pages include a link to the article and a short snippet. I was thinking I would want Google to index the first 3 pages of articles, but after that the pages are not worthwhile. Could these pages harm me and should they be noindexed and/or added as a canonical URL to the main news page - or is leaving them as is fine because they are so deep into the site that Google won't see them, but I also won't be penalized for having week content? Thanks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Duplicate page titles Wordpress SEO/Yoast
Hi I have a Wordpress site using the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast. Everything appears to be fine except that on 1 Feb SEOMoz crawl suddenly picked up a bunch of errors. The errors are duplicate page titles, and these exist only for the mysite.com/page/X pages. I can't find any setting in Yoast that looks wrong or tells me how to fix this. The pages are also dynamically canonicalizing to themselves - not sure if this makes any difference although I don't know how this is happening. Does anyone know how to fix this duplicate title error? Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alextanner0 -
Number of forum posts per topic page
When optimizing a forum topic page for SEO, would it be better to have a higher number of posts per page than seperating the topic up into multiple pages? For example, out of the box a forum may display 15 posts per topic page - would there be any SEO benifit in changing that number to say 30 posts per page? I.e. more content per page and decreasing unnecessary "page 2, page 3, page 4"... etc. Your thoughts and comments are most appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Xml sitemap advice for website with over 100,000 articles
Hi, I have read numerous articles that support submitting multiple XML sitemaps for websites that have thousands of articles... in our case we have over 100,000. So, I was thinking I should submit one sitemap for each news category. My question is how many page levels should each sitemap instruct the spiders to go? Would it not be enough to just submit the top level URL for each category and then let the spiders follow the rest of the links organically? So, if I have 12 categories the total number of URL´s will be 12??? If this is true, how do you suggest handling or home page, where the latest articles are displayed regardless of their category... so I.E. the spiders will find l links to a given article both on the home page and in the category it belongs to. We are using canonical tags. Thanks, Jarrett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jarrett.mackay0