Linking Campaigns: Consistency is the Key to Success

by Trey Pennewell

Published on this site: September 2nd, 2006 - See more articles from this month

Many webmasters understand the importance of creating back links to their site. They understand that creating back links is one of the most important things they can do to increase the search engine results placement (SERPs) for their website. However, what most webmasters fail to understand is that they need to create back links needs on a consistent and regular basis.

Pro's & Con's of Using Reprint Articles as a Back Linking Method

One popular and efficient method of creating back links is to submit original, good quality articles to publishers and webmasters. Most serious internet marketers utilize the services of a number of article distribution services to help them get their articles to people interested in using reprint articles. Creating original articles, and adding an authors box with a link back to your site, has become one of the preferred methods of generating back links for many webmasters.

The problem that arises from this link building strategy is that a webmaster will write, or hire a writer, to create a large number of articles. The webmaster will then insist that all of these newly created articles be sent out immediately. Submitting all of these articles at one time, say within a week, will devalue the links that you are creating with the articles.

Imagine submitting 100 or 1,000 articles in a single week to a variety of sources. What do you think the response will be from the websites and newsletters that accept free reprint articles? Often times the results are quite poor and leave the webmaster disappointed with the low number of back links that are created from this link building campaign.

Why Bombardment does not Work

I actually operate a website that accepts free reprint articles and many webmasters submit to it in hopes of getting their articles published on it. If one source submits a ridiculously large amount of articles at once, I generally delete all of these articles and publish none of them! The reason for this? Mainly, I do not want my website to appear to be a website for the submitter. In other words, I do not want my website to appear to be overly-associated with the submitter's website.

Now let's say that a submitter tells the article distributor to submit 10 articles a week over the course of two and a half months. This will often result in a much higher publication rate and, consequently, a larger number of back links to the submitter's site.

Imagine being the publisher of a newsletter or ezine and opening your inbox to find that the same person has submitted 1,000 articles to you in one week. What do you think your reaction would be? Would your reaction be to block this author from your inbox? Would you try to publish 100 of the articles in your weekly newsletter? As you can see, overwhelming the sources that accept your free reprint articles will often backfire for you as a internet marketer.

Building a First-Class Reputation

Spreading out the distribution of your articles actually creates a positive impression with the sources to whom you are submitting articles. With the website that I operate, I have come to know who my regular submitters are and the quality of their work. It is common for me to publish the articles submitted by a writer or webmaster that has consistently shown that he or she submits quality work. This person has shown me in the past that he or she is not only a good writer, but is also submitting relevant articles.

The Rule of 7 in marketing suggests that after a person has seen your name 7 times, that they will come to recognize your name as an authority and a trusted source. What this means to you, as you distribute free reprint articles, is that a publisher becomes more likely to use your articles after he or she sees your name on a consistent basis and comes to recognize you as a person that submits quality articles.

Consistency is the Key

There has also been a good deal of discussion that search engines prefer seeing submission of content and links on a regular, consistent basis. Following this thought, it is better to get one link to your site, once a week, rather than 52 links to your site in one week. While you will enjoy a surge in rankings temporarily if you create a number of links at once, you will likely not get the full benefit of those links in the long run.

If you were to get 52 links in a week, a search engine might think that you are going to create 52 links a week every week. When they see that you are not creating any more links for the rest of the year, you will penalized by your search engine results placement.

You should determine how frequently you can develop content, and then set your distribution schedule accordingly. If you can only create one article per month, then you should only distribute one article per month. One per week, one per month, your frequency is not important. What is important is your consistency.

Matt Cutts Proves The Importance of Consistency in a Case Study

Creating links is much the same as creating content for your website. Consistent updates to your website will increase your search engine results placement, whereas simply sticking hundreds of pages on your site at once and never updating it will hurt your rankings.

Matt Cutts recently made mention in a video on his blog about one such case here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3583760678227172395 . He gives an example of a website that launched with millions of pages, and he shows how this attracts the scrutiny of the Google team. He recommends that it would have been much better to submit a few thousand pages at a time, instead of rolling out millions of pages on launch.

This thought process should be applied to creating links as well. The bottom line is that consistency is the key to success, when it comes to creating back links to your website. Create a consistent back linking pattern and you will see better results from the search engine ranking algorithms.

Trey Pennewell is the lead writer at the Links and Traffic Link Building Service http://www.LinksandTraffic.com , owned by Bill Platt. Trey and Bill practice what they preach... They generally distribute only one article per week for the purpose of promoting their own websites. Consistency is always best. Trey also owns and manages the http://www.InvisibleMBA.com website, which only accepts informational articles related to getting an education. Feel free to reprint this article, so long as all links are made clickable.