Most Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts agree
that links back to your site have a great impact on
your ranking in the major search engines. Think of it
like an election; your site is a candidate and every
link to your site is a vote. Of course, it was never
quite that simple (high ranking, relevant sites have
more voting power) but now it may have gotten even more
complicated.

The Dampening Link Filter

It seems that Google may have introduced something
called a “Dampening Link Filter” into its
indexing algorithm. I’ll give you a layperson’s
overview of this filter, but for more intimate details,
check out WebProNews.

More and more people are realising the importance of
links back to your site (or “backlinks”).
For some time, companies have been engaging in all sorts
of link campaigns designed to generate thousands of
backlinks. Many of these campaigns haven’t really
paid too much attention to the context or lifespan of
these links. And Google knows it. Because these campaigns
are designed to artificially generate the perception
of a site’s importance – to trick the search
engines into thinking they’re important –
it’s been suggested that Google has decided to
put an end to it. Apparently, there’s evidence
to suggest that Google has introduced a new link filter
to dampen the effect of new backlinks. So if your link
generation campaign has just created 500 links in a
day from seemingly irrelevant sites, Google will suspect
it of being artificial, and refuse to pass on the full
effect of those links – at least for a while. Well,
that’s how the theory goes, anyway.

It has been argued that you can avoid being penalized
by this filter by generating links:

• more slowly;


• from relevant sites; and


• which have a long lifespan.

The wisdom of relevance and lifespan is already well
established; the dampening filter is simply one more
reason why people should start to heed it. Writing and
submitting SEO articles for online publication is one
way to do so.

This article explains how SEO articles satisfy each
of these three conditions. (For the basics of SEO article
writing, take a look at How
to Top Google by Writing Articles.)

Build Backlinks Slowly

Writing quality articles takes time. It’s as simple
as that. Even an SEO copywriter can’t just bang
an article together in a morning – it has to be
well considered. It must be accurate, informative, interesting,
well written, and topical. And once you’ve written
the article, the real work begins. You then have to
submit it to your favourite article submit sites. And
as they all have different requirements and idiosyncrasies,
submitting your article to 50 submit sites can take
you all day!

Once submitted, even the best articles will only be
published gradually. A good article can be published
2 or 3 times a day for a week or two, then interest
tapers off. But still, over the course of 6 months a
single good article can be published hundreds of times!
And remember, each time is a link.

Build Backlinks From Relevant Sites

As soon as you choose the topic of your article, you
define the type of site that will publish it. All online
publishers have an agenda; they want to generate traffic.
Whether for commercial or benevolent reasons, they want
particular kinds of articles for very specific audiences.
Your article won’t be published on irrelevant sites
simply because the publishers of those sites get nothing
out of it.

Of course, your article may be published on sites that
are only marginally relevant. For instance, this article
may be published on general copywriting websites, advertising
websites, web design websites, home business websites,
etc. But the beauty of a well written SEO article is
that you get to optimize it for the keywords that you
want to rank for. So even if the keywords on the publishing
site don’t quite match your own target keywords,
the page containing your link (i.e. your article) does.

What’s more, you even have the power to optimize
the links themselves. For instance, as an SEO copywriter,
I can distribute backlinks throughout my article that
use my target keywords as the link text (e.g. copywriter,
SEO
copywriter, advertising
copywriter, and website
copywriter ;-). Some submit sites don’t let
you do this, but most will – at least in the byline.

And one other thing – other people link to good
articles. This can increase the Page Rank of the site
containing your article, which, in turn, can increase
the page rank of your own site. It’s a win-win
situation!

Build Backlinks With a Long Lifespan

The quality of your SEO article determines the lifespan
of your backlink. Write a very helpful article, make
it easy to read, and choose a topic which isn’t
going to go away in a hurry, and your article will stay
online for years.

In any event, most publishers tend not to clear out
their article libraries simply because it’s better
for them to have lots of content available to both readers
and search engines.

Conclusion

While it’s no new phenomenon to SEO veterans and
SEO copywriters, the writing of SEO articles to generate
backlinks is a tactic which offers much in the way of
ranking. The possibility of a Google dampening link
filter simply increases the value of that offering.

Happy writing!

About the Author

* Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter and heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com for further details or more FREE articles.